


Undertow

by JoCarthage



Series: Kintsugi Series [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, F/M, Fluff, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kylo Ren and Rey Are Not Related, M/M, Post-Prison, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Prison, Slow Burn, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-25 13:43:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13835967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: It started with the ocean; it always did. But since she’d left him inches from Snoke’s viscera, no dream had ever started above the waves. They always began with drowning.Rey fell into sleep and opened her eyes to the cold silica-infused water of Ahch-To. The full moon revealed the shapes strange tides had wrought on the rocks beneath the cave. She was about to break for the surface when she saw a dark-and-pale shape hanging in the water meters ahead of her. It was him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've really enjoyed writing this piece and comments and kudos make my whole day. It's finished at about 10 chapters, but I want to polish each chapter as it goes up. I should have all of it posted before I go to Nigeria in the second-half of March so if you're like me and allergic to WIPs, just subscribe and check back in in 2 weeks.
> 
> A note on tags: I never want something I write to hurt a reader; I've gone through panic attacks because of badly-tagged work and don't want anyone to go through that. I enjoy the heck out of this trash-fire of a ship and want you to get to enjoy it too. If I missed a tag, please let me know. If you have questions about what I mean by "torture" or any of the other tags, my asks are open on my tumblr (jocarthage.tumblr.com) or you can leave a comment. At its core, this piece is about healing and protecting each other, with a lot of hurt/comfort in between. There's a lot of darkness in their story and a lot of light. If that's not your jam, I totally understand.
> 
> Also, I JoCarthage on tumblr!

It started with the ocean; it always did. But since she’d left him inches from Snoke’s viscera, no dream had ever started above the waves. They always began with drowning.

Rey fell into sleep and opened her eyes to the cold silica-infused water of Ahch-To. The full moon revealed the shapes strange tides had wrought on the rocks beneath the cave. She was about to break for the surface when she saw a dark-and-pale shape hanging in the water meters ahead of her. She froze, calculating if it was heading towards her or would let her pass unharmed. But it was unmoving, drifting downwards into the blackest deep — and it was human.

She struck out, dream-strength pulling her forward and she saw — his face, eyes closed, hair a nest of Medusian curls, chest bare, legs still clad in his thick black pants. She thought — just like she always thought — about the way the balance would be affected if he just, drifted downwards. If, this time, she didn’t save him. And then she closed those final meters, looping her arm around his still-warm body and pulling him to the surface, dragging him to the shore of the cave, pumping his chest and willing him to live.

When his eyes flew open, he threw himself away from her, coughing the remaining water from his lungs and trying to get his hands in front of him, eyes frantic, wild for a weapon, some way to defend himself, though he was defenseless in every way that mattered here.

“Why did you save me?” He demanded, voice hoarse and pained. His arms went around his chest, to keep warm or to protect some small measure of his dignity, she had no idea.

She didn’t answer, just turned to the stack of firewood she imagined would be there and began searching inside herself for the ability to start it.

She felt him stand, and forced herself not to watch his every move. Sometimes he was violent, and she would deal with that; this was one of the few places he could fight back anymore, and her rage was always there, just under the surface too. She understood the need to work it out in bruises and pain sometimes. She never let him hurt her, never let him win, but there were nights she pulled herself from their dream, gasping and grasping an imagined lightsaber wound to the arm, to the thigh, down her face, just barely missing her eye. They both wounded each other as much as they knew the other could survive, leaning their shared violence against the other’s. She woke more often scrambling to the Millennium Falcon’s refresher to wash and wash her hands, sure her could still see his blood on her lifeline.

Other nights were like this.

He stepped up, so close the water running down his deeply impractical pants dripped on the back of her neck; he knelt beside her, careful not to touch, and looked sternly at the kindling.

“Let me,” he said, and the wood burst into fire, nearly consuming all the wood she’d imagined in one fireball. She laughed — it was so extravagant, so excessive. Dark lordling he was, but ridiculously showy too. She felt him stiffen, standing and stalking away; she let him. She couldn’t help that she found him utterly too much sometimes, and if he was going to sulk, well, it wasn’t like he could sulk in the waking world, not like his captors allowed it. If he wanted to here, she would go swimming with the razorback leviathans for a few hours before waking and trying again tomorrow night. This time, he’d startled at her laugh and said:

“What's so funny?”

She shook her head, not answering. He drew a little closer again, drawn to the heat or the company or something else entirely; she had no idea.

His voice was hoarse and raw; this change in him she hated. She figured it was from the screaming, his dream-mind not remembering how a voice should sound except ripped apart from drowning every night and being forced to scream and scream every day. She was no fan of the Chriss prisons’ form of justice, that she knew. He moved to the other side of the fire and repeated himself, eyes intent on hers:

“What’s so funny?”

She had to answer that terrible grate of a voice coming out of his strange-soft face: “You are so extra.”

He huffed, folding his legs and holding two large, square hands out to the swiftly-burning fire. She glanced at his arms, but whether he’d healed or his mind wasn’t including the intricate cuts that had covered them like a trader’s route tattoos when she’d seen him last night, she didn’t know. She was grateful for the expanse of clean, pale skin, flecked only with moles and the old scars she’d helped bring there.

“I think you need to let me go,” he said, and every Kelvin of the fire’s warmth left Rey’s body. She thought they weren’t talking about this, not giving voice to it, whatever they’d been doing these past dozen nights, this fighting-holding, killing-comforting dream thing they didn’t talk about.

“Hmm?” She said, hoping he would drop it. He leaned around the fire, voice darker and steadier.

“Your light, it’s darkening. You can’t have missed it. You can’t be both light and dark, not in this world, not in this time anyway, and I think,” and he choked this time, tremulous grip on his voice losing weakening for the barest of seconds, but they were seconds that squeezed her heart like he’d slipped his fingers beneath her skin, “I think you need to let me go. I’m never getting out and I’m getting weaker; there’s no way you can get to me in time. After Crait, after the Raddus, after the bridge was destroyed, there is no one left in the resistance who would want you to.”

She stood up. “Just you try me,” she said, and turned to the water, diving in.

His words followed her as she took solace in the darkening deep from a galaxy gone mad: _That’s what I was afraid you'd say._

 

—

“Have we narrowed down the list of prisons?” She asked Finn, who shook his head, hands spreading-out the star-charts he was combing through, focusing on yet another planet to review.

“The Chriss have hundreds of prison planets, and hundreds of prisons on them; it’s their main revenue source as a system and they keep the location of their prized prisoners secret as part of their code.”

Rey nodded; they both knew this, had been over it again and again since they’d left for this mission a week ago. But she wanted to stay focused: if Ben was weakening, then it meant they needed to go faster. She’d convinced the resistance leaders that a man of his power could be put to terrible use in the hands of another government, even broken as he seemed to be becoming under the Chriss ministrations. She had also convinced the resistance that she should be tasked with finding and retrieving him, with Finn, Poe, Chewbacca, and the Millennium Falcon as her support. Rose was still recovering, with BB-8 keeping a close eye on her. General Organa didn’t know about Rey’s shared dreams, the time under the island, but she was aware Rey and her son were connected. The General didn’t know a lot of things; Rey was going to keep it that way.

—

Rey was on the co-pilot shift when Poe said: “You’re looking tired; sleeping ok?”

Her team knew something of the dreams, that she spoke with Ben Solo in them, though to them he was still Kylo Ren. She couldn’t have hid the gasping way she’d been waking up these past weeks, the shivering cold she found herself engulfed by when she couldn’t get the fire started in her dream, when the winter wind blew frigid into the cave and Ben couldn’t speak from remembered pain.

“Sleeping is easy; resting is harder.” She said, casting a smile his way. Poe nodded, adjusting the controls. At the beginning, the dreams had been very short, nearly entirely under water. She’d grab him, yank him to the surface, he’d start fighting her, and she’d leave him as soon as she knew he wouldn’t die, Rey coercing herself awake, unwilling to share even a dream with him. Then, for a week, they’d fought, drawing blood and pain from each others skin.

But there’d been a dream, the night before she’d made her case to the General, when they’d surfaced together, brimming with laughter, light on their lips, for no reason she could explain. After that, it was like he would not leave her side — and she couldn’t bear to make him before they’d at least spoken a few words. She’d begun to feel his loneliness in her bones.

Back in the Falcon, she heard herself say: “You know how, in dreams, sometimes the rules are just written really clearly?” Poe glanced over at her and nodded his head, eyes going back to the shifting lines outside the front window. “Like, you know how to fly like a bird or swim when in the waking world, you couldn’t. Or, for no reason, you know you have to jump out of that X-Wing, or you know you have to touch that engine coil or you know you —“

She couldn’t finish that phrase because she wanted to say _salvage that scrap-metal of a human_. She wanted to be kinder than that, wanted to be gentler. She knew that, sometimes, on the barest slivers of luck, he could hear what she said during the waking hours, and if his screaming, drowning, falling, flailing, ripped-apart nightmares were any indication, he was having a rough enough go of it without her pitching in.

She continued: “Do you think someone should be responsible for her dreams, be held responsible if someone gets hurt, if dying in a dream could really kill a person? If that is one of the rules she knows is true and can’t test. Do you think she’d be responsible if she didn’t try to change those rules, the rules that govern the dream?”

Poe had lived his life in the resistance and had set views about people’s responsibilities not just to see the world for what it is, but to imagine what it could be, to make it get there, if only a millimeter closer; she feared his judgement that she wasn’t doing enough.

But sometimes, he had all the practicality of a man who trusted his 9 lives to a machine he’d built and rebuilt from scrap: “Does this theoretical dreamer have lucid dreaming?” He asked. Rey paused. She raked her brain, trying to remember where she’d heard that phrase before. She gave up:

“What does that mean?” She asked. She’d long since decided that she knew more about salvage than anyone in the resistance could learn in 10 lifetimes. If there were some things she’d missed out on during her years in the school of scavenging, she could pick them up on the way without shame, just like she wouldn’t shame Ben when he —

“It means being able to control your dreaming.” Poe said patiently and Rey paused, thinking, then said:

“Wait, can’t everyone control their dreams?” Poe’s eyes widened and he shook his head, sharing a crooked grin.

“A lot of people probably wish they could, but no, most of us just get to ride along, trapped in whatever nightmare we’re handed.” He paused, then asked: “Can you? Lucid dream?”

Rey nodded: “I’ve never done it any other way. It’s kind of like — “ and she reached for a metaphor. “When we were on Coruscant and saw those improv players? Like, the whole play was going on without them, and then they stepped on and started changing things.” He nodded, following her train of thought, “Well, that’s what my dreams have always been like. I step onto the set, and I can either follow the script, or change it; I usually know the plot. I can step away from something if it’s too frightening,” or too disturbing, as her dreams of being hunted by a creature in a mask had been after her first encounter with Kylo Ren, “And I can move the plot another way, though it makes the dreams less vivid, more black-and-white.”

Poe considered: “I grew up being told that our dreams serve a purpose, that they let us work-out what we can’t or won’t in our waking lives. We can be stronger, weaker, more loving, more violent in a world without consequences. Now, people who’ve been through what you’ve been through might get into a trauma loop in a dream. Going over and over and over the same crappy scenario doesn’t help anybody.”

“But I’d worry that controlling dreams too far, making them too safe, keeps that hindbrain from working-out what it needs to work out to keep you healthy in the grey-matter. Better to let your dreams carry you with the plot they came with, to use your metaphor.” He paused, and said in a lower voice:

“But something tells me it’s not your dreams that you’re most worried about. Since you’re sharing dreams, perhaps it’s been Kylo Ren’s dream you’ve been controlling, easing perhaps. Maybe he can’t control his dreams, even though you can when you’re in them. Maybe lucid dreaming is something you could teach him, to give him something to hold onto while he waits for us to figure out what Chriss cubby-hole he’s been socked away in.”

Poe reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, letting her start under the unexpected touch before setting into it: “But I’m still most worried about you; if you can find a way to get more rest, I’ll be happy for you. I don’t really care if it helps him; I’m just worried for you.”

Rey nodded and said: “I’ll try,” before checking her crono: 10 more hours until she’d sleep again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are going to get worse for Ben Solo before they get better. The trigger warning tags come into stronger play here, so keep an eye-out. The Reylo poem of the day is: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/geese/geese.html

The next time she saw him was a three days later. Each night, she’d opened her eyes under the blue-grey water of Ahch-To and found herself alone. She’d searched and searched, going far enough out to sea the currents took her and she’d had to force herself awake before she drowned. When she went back, she headed straight for shore, tracking the sweep of the moon as she gathered firewood, meditated, and slipped into other dreams, all the while stretching her senses out, looking for him. 

On the third night, she awoke underwater and saw him, right in front of her, hair a mess, eyes wide and not seeing her, wilder with her scar dark across his face. She wrapped her arms around his waist as he struggled, trying to get back down to the dark, the quiet, the drowning deep that always called him. He was spluttering and fighting her when she forced him to the surface. He was wearing his full get-up this time sans mask, his thick robes tangling around her feet as she dragged him towards the entrance of the cave.

He continued to try to get free, sinking when he succeeded, her breath catching in her lungs as she dove down again to haul him up. 

“Stop,” she snapped, “Just, stop.” And he didn’t, because of course he didn’t. He was here and not here. He didn’t stop struggling until she got him up the slate-sanded beach, laying him his back and backing away. He writhed for a moment before settling down with a pained look on his face, his eyes shut tight again. She called out for the first time what she had thought had always been obvious: “This is a dream. You can control it.”

He shook his head, eyes closing tighter. She knelt and gripped a hand in his black robe, leaning closer.

“You’re dreaming. You can wake-up.”

He shook his head again, hair covering his eyes; his hair was longer, more tangled than she remember it. She thought he might be trying to get himself so mussed up, so tangled, that even when he had to open his eyes, he would still only be able to see darkness. Rey’s hands raised slowly to his face, catching thick strands and pushing them back behind his ears, watching for his reaction. She considered stopping herself, then decided to let herself following the plot of this dream, just this once. 

He arched towards her touch, eyes closed tight, hunching his shoulder closer to her, trying to catch her hand with his cheek, not daring to raise his hands, not daring to touch her, but tracking the movement, following — what, the warmth of her? Or the tenderness of touch?

This broken, foolish boy broke her heart nightly.

She got her fingers caught in a tangle and she gentled her grip, but not before he’d winced, tried to ease away from her into the cold, dark, wet stone at his back; but it had no give in it, no more than her hands did. She changed the pressure and began easing her fingers between the strands, bringing them into some semblance of order as his breathing evened out, slowed. She was fascinated with the texture — thick, curling, nothing like her ramrod straight, sun-thinned hair. His was dark and rich, like chocolate cake, like velvet — like the softest fur on the sweetest animal, but the kind of sweetness that hid a saber-toothed smile.

She was so focused on his hair, on thoughts of whether his body in the waking world was in danger or had a soft place to sleep tonight that it took a moment for her to realize he’d opened his eyes. Not entirely — just enough so he could look at her through lashes so thick, she didn’t know how he could make her out. She kept her hands in his hair, kept moving them, and in a fluid movement he rolled onto his side facing away from her, resting his cheek on the soft cloth of her knees with his hair spread out across her hands, giving his back to her, giving her his _neck_. She wanted to shake him, to turn him over, to tell him, _no, no, you don’t know if you can trust me — I don’t know if I can trust me with you_.

But here he was, trusting her. She would have to do her best.

She let her fingers trail from the back of his head to the sopping black of his jacket and he shook, a shiver, something like a sigh, something like the beginning of a cold. She said, voice soft:  
  
“Are you cold?” And he shook again, not responding. “Ben, you don’t have to be cold. Just — decide you’re warm. This is a dream.”

He tensed, clenching his jaw so tight it made a muscle pop in his cheek, back and stomach muscles stiff to try and control his shiver-shaking. He covered his face with his arm, wet cloth mussing the hair she’d just straightened.

Rey heard a thread of desperation in her voice: “Look, you can change it. You’re in a dream, you don’t —“ and then she sighed, seeing herself go about this in the wrong way. She raised her hand, closed her eyes, and then there was a fire, warm and crispy in front of them.

“Look, Ben, can you see the fire?” He moved his arm away from his face and looked through the mess he’d made of his hair again to see the fire crackling merrily. He said:

"How -- how did you do that? There was no wood there before." His voice sounded so much worse than usual, a ragged scrap, nothing like his melodious tone back when they’d fought Snoke together, when she’d last seen him in the waking world, last felt the strength of his soul against the strength of hers. Her head ached with a rush of held-back tears. She never thought she’d miss the flash of his lightsaber, but it turns out, there were worse things than seeing a sometimes-enemy strong, hale, and free.

“We’re in a dream, Ben, one you can change if you want to.” He shook his head and she sighed internally. She didn’t want to force this, but she wanted him to have some place he had some kind of choices, some kind of freedom.

He was shaking his head, but he flipped over, facing her now, giving his too-broad back to the fire, shoving his ridiculous cloak behind him so the cold water could steam free. The yards of sopping fabric didn’t do him much good here, but maybe they provided some kind of protection that mattered to him. She leaned over him a little, hands outstretched towards the fire, her clothes already drying. She’d imagined herself into a lighter, easier-to-dry outfit after they hit shore every night and cursed herself that it had taken this long to wonder why he never had. She had assumed it was him being contrary, a personality trait she would now try to leverage now:

“If I’m right, and it’s a dream, what do you have to lose by proving me wrong?” She asked. “If it’s a dream — ”

“If this is a dream, then it means I have to wake up.” He hissed. She ran a hand over his back, trying to calm him down and he flinched so hard towards her that his forehead knocked into her hipbone. She yanked her hand away and paused, a sickness flooding her as she realized the wetness on her hand was not water and the darkness of the cloak was not the fabric alone — it was stained through-and-through with blood.

“If this is a dream, then I have to remember what happened before I sleep — and I don’t want to. I want to be _here_. I want to be _here_.” He said, voice getting stronger as he spoke. With a pained sound, he sat up between her and the fire, turning to face it, broad expanse of his back still within reach. She reached out, very gently, very slowly. She unhitched the cloak from his shoulders, gathering it up and tossing it deeper into the cave. She reached up to his collar, trying to find some kind of hook or clasp. She fumbled for a moment before he muttered:

“Here,” he said, and wincing, reached a hand up under his hair at the nape of his neck, pinching his fingers and flicking his wrist. The cloth sagged, pulling to the next button on his back that had been cleverly hidden inside the fabric. She undid it and then next and the next, focusing on stopping the rough fabric from scraping on the mess of his back.

The starlight was cool and brightened by the warm flickers of the fire, illuminating the harsh red lines and curves scratching across the constellation of moles freckling his pale skin marking out the words. They spelled: “Sith Lord.” Those two words were written over and over and over again across his back, dipping down below the waistband of his pants; large and small, in different handwriting and blade widths, some barely scratched in and some deep enough to still be bleeding scarlet in the honey light of the fire. He moved to turn away so she couldn’t see the words, fumbling to re-close the buttons as he scrambled to the other side of the fire.

She held her palms up, stained and streaked with his blood. “Ben, Ben, look, I won’t pry, I won’t touch you if —“ and his eyes widened, his body beginning to shake again without her body or the fire for warmth, and then he did something she couldn’t have expected — he chuckled. It was dark and harsh, but it was real:

“There’s nothing I want less than for you to stop touching me. Yours has been the only kind touch I’ve felt — well, since the fire on Yavin IV.” And she kept her eyes as neutral as she could, didn’t let him see the pain that blossomed in her chest at the thought of dead padawan children, at his lonely adulthood under Snoke’s control, but something in her face made him move further away from her all the same.

“I don’t say this for _pity_ , I _don’t_ _want pity_.” He said, voice petulant and rushed, and so she lowered one of her internal barriers, just a bit, just to give him her memory of them laughing, surfacing days ago with a lightness she couldn’t describe. She hadn’t let him see her warm feelings on that night, because she didn’t know if she could trust them to be true, because she didn’t want to give him false hope. 

Rey had no idea what would happen one second after she freed him from the Chriss prison planet, had no idea what would happen the instant she got the manacles off his wrists — would he go back to the First Order to exact revenge on now-Supreme Leader Hux for deposing him? Fall into her arms? Go to war against the resistance? Become a moisture farmer? Be stark, raving mad, only lucid in his dreams? She kept those fears off her face and out of her heart, let him see only that she looked forward to better dreams. 

But he stayed away, back still bleeding, cloth still gaping since he couldn’t manage to re-button his robe himself though he tried, and so she lowered her barrier further, needing him to understand what brought her here over and over again, to this minute, this moment, this place, this thought. She hoped he might be convinced he could heal himself or at least let her heal him, at least here in the dream, if he understood why she was here. 

She decides to try show him a vision of what she would do when she found him in the waking world, spooling the thought out as he stopped backing away from her — and more importantly, the light of the warming fire.

—

Rey hastily arranged her imaginings of how she would free him into five rooms lining a corridor in her mind as she pulled him into her mind. She’d only meant to show him one or two, but as he stood beside her in the corridor, tall and healthy in what looked like Jedi robes, she realized too late that none of the doors had locks, and no matter how she tried, all of them swung open. She could not shape what she showed Ben Solo inside her mind in this dream, could not keep the worst of her visions locked away. She hoped with a finger-twisting, fervent wish that he would forgive her for what he was about to see.

In her first vision, she finds him on the ground of a barren soulless cave of a cell, carved out of a cold, grey-harsh rock, part of some abandoned mine. She lowers herself into the oubliette on a rope, blaster fire above her, and levers open the bars of his cell. He sits in the tiny space, legs folded, hands on knees, straining to meditate through the pain — because unlike what this vision had looked like in Rey's memory, now his body in her mind’s eye had the words “Sith Lord” carved into it in unsealing blood.

The Ben standing beside her watches as she forces the bars and extends her hand to his caged future, who stares at her uncomprehendingly. She reaches, like she had once done through time and space, like he had once done for her, and he just stares past her, unblinking. They feel it then, a wall, some kind of barrier, invisible but keeping him from seeing her, from knowing he was bare inches from freedom. Perhaps he doesn’t even see these dank walls, these dripping stones, water of a thousand, thousand years working its way to the bottom of this chilly mine, leaving his hair and clothes mildewy and damp as the bottom of a fountain.

Rey focuses, forces the wall, drives all her rage from their sparring, all her anger and her light as well, her pure _will_ to save him, and there is just one slice, one crack, and she’s pushing and there’s — a blast of air. His eyes snap to hers, he shakes, stumbling to his feet, eyes wide. She tosses him his lightsaber and he grins, bringing it between the manacles on his hands and slicing them apart. And she hands him the rope out, and he begins climbing up, damaged body motivated by more than enough force to get going, and she follows, watching his blade catch the blaster fire as she finishes the ascent behind him.

The door closes. The next second one opens.

—

Rey finds Ben in one of a long line of clear plastic cells in cubes of 27 under a wicked yellow light, the kind she’d seen described in notes from one of their Chriss spies. His box gives him barely enough room to stretch his arms out, a blanket in a corner, and a 'fresher behind opaque glass accessible by one prisoner at a time in the central cube. This Ben was shaking, shivering in a temperature which was comfortable for the Chriss but not for humans.

She would cut through the hard plastic and he would see her and duck his head:

“Have you come to kill me?” He asks and she pushes into his mind, and says:

_No, I’m here to save you_. He hunches further. _You can’t, no one can_ , and she freezes still, waiting to see if there’s a hidden trap in his horrible room. There's none, at least none that she can see. Rey kneels, letting her knees hit the plastic with a painful thud, looking down and seeing a hundred, a thousand other prisoners, straight down in boxes on boxes, cubes on cubes, on either side of her, constant and following her forever, completely without mercy.

She holds out her hand to him and he doesn't react. She waits, kneeling in front of him and her radio crackles — the signal she has only minutes to get him out of their carefully-planned route. She gives up on waiting, yanking his arm over her shoulder and lever him up, his body too light, limp against hers. He barely shuffles, feet dragging, eyes dull, no light coming into them when he sees the Falcon; in the med bay, his body is chilled no matter how many blankets she piled on him in the med bay.

After weeks, she realizes he's not going to come out of this, that she was in charge of a vegetable, an untrained nurse for a formerly untamed-man, temperament totally unsuited for his care but finding out that no one else will step up for him, cares enough to try. This may be the vision she fears the most.

—

Rey recognizes the plot of the third vision as it begins and strains to scramble back, to force herself awayand she can’t stop it, it just rolls on. This one she hates, she wills to stop, but the blaster bolt has left the muzzle and she knows Ben is watching it unfold with her.

She finds Ben in a prison with no cells, no boxes, but green, rolling grass beside an ornamental lake surrounded by high white walls. He's smiling and laughing at a delicacy-laden table with other high-born criminals. He would be safe and sane and he — he laughs at her when she runs towards him, bloodied from fighting her way past the guards, hair askew, eyes muddied by dark circles. He is well-rested, eyes hard; he guffaws when she tells him about the dreams; he tells his friends those were his idea of jokes, his tricks, something he came-up with to pass the time, to lure her here. He calls the guards who shoot her, force her into a much worse version of that prison, the Chriss holding her responsible for resistance crimes she did not commit. He laughs as they hurt her; just laughs and laughs and laughs.

Rey finally wrenches them out of that vision only to fall into one that she was not even sure she knew about, a room she had not even allowed herself to set foot in for fear of what it might contain.

—

In this vision, Rey finds him hurt, bleeding on the floor of a prison cell, looking like he does now, hurt but not beaten. She reaches the bars of his cell and he rushes to her, threading his arms between the durasteel to wrap around her waist and she presses closer, slips her hands through the bars to grip the back of his neck, their foreheads held apart only by the thickness of the bars. He would pull back but she would catch his hand, turning it over and pressing the cold of her lips to the smooth, undamaged skin of his inner wrist.

“I thought I would never find you,” she whispers, wrapped-up in the smell of him, the safety, just for this moment, of the reality of this, the reality of him, his smile, his welcoming her help, her self. There had been a hole in her belly, aching and raw, that she had never known was there until she had him with her again and found it filled, but only for so long as they were touching, only as long as she could count-on his hand in hers. She squeezed his wrist tight, pressing her lips to it again.

“I knew you would come for me,” he says and then he stood back as she activated her lightsaber, slicing through the bars, leaving the perfect gap and she pulls him out and he falls on her, arms wrapping around her, his body warm and _whole_. Not un-harmed — not even in her fantasy does she have that hope — but _whole_. He’s not in pieces, he’s not vague and gone, he is hers and she is his.

—

The vision let them both go and they faded back to their surroundings in the cave. First sounds: the break of the water on the stony shore, the pop and crackles of the fire, Ben's controlled breathing. Then smells: the smell of his blood mixed with the salt from the ocean and of woodsmoke. Rey sucked a breath between her teeth, keeping her eyes closed and tracing the dance of the flames in the red-orange light on her eyelids. She waited for the sound of his lightsaber igniting; perhaps his rage at her presumption or offense at her visions of his weakness will have taught him lucid dreaming where her words could not. Instead, he was standing, walking towards her, closer and closer until Rey needed to know and opened her eyes. He met them, dark eyes bright in firelight as he lowered himself to sit beside her, so close she could have pulled a deep breath and pressed their knees together. She didn’t, too sure she’d made a fool of herself with this, this opening up, and even without that, needing him to have the space to choose if she was something he wanted, in a time and place when she wasn’t unwrapping him piece by piece.

He held his hands out to the flames, flickering light coming through them.

“I could see the truth of some of your visions,” he said, “The circumstances I am in, they are most like the first one, but,” and he paused, eyes fixed on the light: “If I had to choose a way to see you again in the waking world, I would choose the last one.” She leaned back on her arms, letting the firelight sweep across her knees and thighs, letting the barest press of her arm against his send a vision she could not explain.

She made herself tell the truth: “Yeah, me too."

His back was still bleeding and bare. She paused for a moment and then said:

“Would you mind if I try to heal you?” He froze, hands covering his face before making an aborted gesture, perhaps to redo the buttons, perhaps something else. She didn’t know. Finally, he sagged:

“I tried to do it myself, though it's been years since I could, while we were in the vision; I couldn’t get past, some kind of barrier. They have something, where I am, that locks me out of the Force. It’s possible it carries through to here, to my dreams.”

Rey shook her head and then realizing the target of her disgust might not be clear said, “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but I kriffing hate the Chriss and am fantasizing about parting their skin from their bones more and more every day, Maker-save me.”

His eyes were wide, but there was a hint of dark humor in them as he turned his back towards her,bloody mess like a fist in her gut. “That's a goal I share but I would be happy just to be free of them.”

She looked over his back — the only way she knew how to heal was skin-to-skin contact and she would need to rest her whole palm somewhere. She finally spotted one small area that was mostly clear, at the hard curve of his waist. Before touching him, she said:  
  
“If something hurts, worse than a healing should, tell me immediately, don’t wait.” She thought better of it, thought of her own inability to verbalize to healers when she was in pain. She moved closer, reaching a hand around to his other side.

“Squeeze my hand if you need me to stop.” She said, holding her hand out. She meant it to be practical, but the moment his palm touched hers, she was thrown back into that last vision, the feeling of her lips on his skin. She shunted that away, focused on the harm done in front of her. 

“Alright, I’m going to start,” she said, and he laced his fingers through hers just as her palm touched his bare skin and she began to find her center, find her strongest connection to the Force.

“It’s not even accurate,” she grumbled to herself, the thought nagging at her, keeping her from sinking into her meditation.

“Hmm?” He queried, slow breaths marking the rise and fall of his bowed spine, hand tight on hers.

“‘Sith,’” she said, “You’re not a Sith; they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

He chuckled and then hissed as the motion disturbed the cuts on his back. “I don’t get the impression the Chriss have a great depth of knowledge about —“ and he sucked a breath in as she began healing him in earnest.

This healing was _intense_ , more than anything she'd ever done to herself. The wave of _feeling_ , of closeness, of warmth, the heat of the fire on the back of her knuckles, the slow swell of his back as he breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth — it was like the gentlest energy curve she’d ever experienced, thrumming in light waves through her and through him. She spread out his pain, mapping it, starting at the darkest, most debilitating parts. She poured a golden energy into his muscles, torn from writhing, flowing healing over them, knitting them back together until they were strong and loose, tension fading with the hurt. 

Then the blood vessels, slipping their skins closed again like buttons on a robe. Then the lower levels of skin; he’d started playing his fingers over the back of her hand, gentle sweeps across the tendons and veins, rhythm setting the tempo for the flow of light and warm healing into his body. Then the last of the skin, the many, many, too many surface cuts. She felt a wetness on her face, at the thought of how long he must have lay face-down as this was done to him, she could tell from how his muscles had torn, from his strains and bruises that he’d been tied down — but her mind was swept away from that image, that horrible, helpless pain as he slipped his thumb between their palms and swept it across her lifeline, exploring back and forth, back and forth, bringing her back, reconnecting her to the Force, to her intention, as she finished molding his body back together again. 

She took a last sweep through his body, easing bruises, resettling bones; she knew none of this would help in the real world, in the waking world he would wake in hours, sit up with these bleeding cuts, these strained muscles and bruised bones. But perhaps in his sleep he could rest easier without pain; and she couldn't bear to watch him bleed in front of her and not try to help.

She came back to herself realizing she had rested the side of her tear-wet face on the warm, healed skin of his broad shoulder, both arms around around his waist as he played his fingers over her hands, her wrist, tracing the thin lines of her bones. 

Before she let go, she let herself feel, truly feel this thread-hung moment. There was a different kind of magic to holding someone’s hand, nothing to do with the Force and everything to do with the power of insistent bodies. Hands were the most solid thing about a person: they got you your food, they helped you fight. They showed you your first visions of the world and were how you greeted strangers. They could become fists to protect you, could touch soft enough to pet a porg or slap hard enough to end a marriage. And sometimes, only with people you trust, when you really _needed_ it, two hands together could open-up a perfect, doubled, undoubleable thing. Your hyperspace-vision reality could touch theirs and fill-up the entire world with the exact sensation they were feeling. Holding hands with someone you cared for was one of the most intimate things she could think of.

She let go. 

Rey's arms were weighted-down with exhaustion from the work of healing but she redid all but the top button of his robe, giving him cover and some of his armor back. Then she pulled away, worried she’d pushed a boundary too far and he turned, kneeling to face her and grabbed her arms, held on tight. When she kept easing away, he let her go, voice warm and soft:   
  
“Thank you, Rey.”

She nodded, glancing towards the fire. They maybe had another few hours before he woke.

“Lie down with me?” He said, and immediately Rey’s blood didn’t know whether to race for her face or someplace else entirely. Ben coughed and clarified:  
  
“Rest, with me. Healing, even in a dream, can take it out of a person. There’s fire and no danger here tonight; you can rest.”

She nodded, already feeling her eyelids heavy with sleep, and moved to lay on her side. He lay on his back beside her, pinky brushing hers, callouses catching and skin so warm. He rolled his head to the side, looking at her for a long moment, played his fingers closer to hers. Then she locked her critical brain in a corner cabinet of her mind and in one movement, slung her leg over his, pillowing her head on his mostly-dry chest, and listening, listening hard to that heart, that big, bruised, beating heart of his that she fought so hard for. She listened and counted the beats — _alive and here, alive and here_ it said — until she drifted off, knowing that for this minute, he was safe and sound enough for her to rest.


	3. Chapter 3

Poe woke her up that morning: “Up and at ‘em, it’s your shift and I’ve got some shut-eye to catch.” Rey stretched and sat upright, feeling warmer than she had any right to be and entirely, completely at a loss for how to explain what had happened in that dream. 

“Alright, alright,” she said, standing, and Poe caught her shoulder, looking into her eyes. His voice was lower, steadier:

“How’d it go?” She shrugged, saying only: 

“Looks like you were right — he didn’t know he could change the dream. There's something blocking his access to the Force; it may be keeping him from lucid dreaming too.”

Poe nodded, looking like he wanted to say something else, before saying with a smirk:

“He’s always been stubborn, even when I used to babysit him — “ At Rey’s delighted, incredulous eyes he flapped his hands, waving her away — “That's a story for a morning when I have not been driving this hunk of burning durasteel for 8 hours without a break. Catch me when I’m rested and maybe I’ll spill.”

Rey grinned: “I will absolutely do that.” 

Chewie was her co-pilot this shift, with Finn sleeping after having been on a swing shift. They staggered every 4 hours, so everyone got the same amount of sleep and decompression time. She checked their location and saw they were 2 hours out from their destination, Altum, the 5th Chriss prison planet on their list. 

“We’re coming in at light speed and ducking behind their satellite moon to meet-up with our spy?” She confirmed and Chewie nodded, pulling up the detailed plan Finn had made for their approach. Eyes on the lines, she sat back in her chair and breathed for a moment, thinking back on the night before. Why had she healed him? Why had she let him see those things inside of her — and what did it mean that he wanted that, wanted that with her? Was that something he’d felt before, before being a prisoner? Was this some kind of captive syndrome, him latching onto the only kind thing n his world? And what did that make her, if she took advantage of that?

She wanted to ask someone for help, for advice, but Chewbacca had watched Kylo Ren stab his best friend in the world and then shot him in the leg for it; Finn had been forced to fight by the same organization Kylo Ren had so happily joined and benefitted from; and Poe, well, Poe had good advice but Rey wasn’t sure she could take the teasing that would come from asking this particular question. She had another thought, one Chewbacca could probably help her with:

“What do you think Leia will do with him, when we get him back?”

He questioned her ‘when’ but said he didn’t know. Suddenly, that was all Rey could think about — was she freeing him only to have him sent to the gallows? She couldn’t solve her mixed-up feelings, but this, this was something she could do something about. She did a quick calculation in her head — yes, it was waking-hours on the planet the resistance had taken refuge on. She dialed their secure comm line to Leia’s steward, and waited:

“Hello, Canvidia Industries, how may I help you?” Came the steward’s stern voice. Rey replied:

“I’m calling about the plumbing in building 184, can you get someone out to help?”

The voice paused and said: “I should have someone available, let me check.”

Rey waited, clicking letting her know when the line encryptions took hold. Then the General’s voice:

“Rey, this is unexpected. Have you found him?” Her voice was professional and polished as always, but Rey thought she could detect a hint of worry, a bit of anticipation.

She shook her head, even though she knew the audio-only feed wouldn’t transmit it. “No, Ma’am, I’m sorry. But what I called about was —“

Leia interrupted, either because of an issue with the connection timing or to take control of the conversation, Rey wasn’t sure: “And Chewie, Finn, and Poe, how are they doing?”

Chewie answered for himself and Rey said: “The rest of the team is well, ma’am, but what I called about was —“

“We’re doing well here,” the General said, “I’m about to head into a Justice Committee meeting —“

Rey interrupted her, wincing as she did so, “Ma’am, that’s exactly what I wanted to call about. What’s going to happen to Ben after we get him back?”

There was a pause, static on the line, and Rey waited. After hearing nothing for a long moment, she said: “Ma’am, did I lose you?”

She heard Leia clear her throat and say: “No, Rey, you still have me here. I can tell you what I know: the resistance is a democracy; the few prisoners we have captured from the First Order have been tried by a jury of members of the resistance and sentenced by them. Some have been given prison sentences, some work details, some exile, and some,” and here she paused silence filled with static on the line, “some have been executed. It's rare, but it is a possibility. And we’ve never tried someone as high-ranking or who has done as much harm as my son.”

More static, while Rey tried to think, Leia breaking in to ask:  
  
“Was that all?”

Rey replied, mouth going faster than her mind, going on instinct: “Ma’am, I think we should tell the resistance what’s happening to him.” 

She could heard her starting to interrupt and she bullied through, hands fisting in her lap: “Look, I’m going to get him back. And he deserves to be tried for what he did. But they’re going to want punishment, and he’s —“ Her voice caught and she hoped the crackle of the static would keep its shaking from the General’s ears, “— Ben’s already being punished, badly, in ways that the resistance would never require. But no one’s going to believe that, not if they find out all at once that he’s alive and we’ve been using resources to save him and he was hurt but now he’s ok. I'm afraid he won't get a fair sentence if we don't get people context ahead of time. Otherwise, they'll be starting over from scratch. But if we let people know _now_ that we’re going to get him, that he’s imprisoned, and we give updates on what’s being done to him, maybe when the time comes, the jury will give him, I don't know, something like time served.” Rey shook her head, trying to get her thoughts in order. “I just, I don’t want him to be hurt more than he is being. Exile is one thing, but torture — “

Leia’s voice was harsh when it came through the line: “My son is being tortured?”

And Rey realized that this, this was something she'd kept to herself; for his privacy; because she didn't think anyone would care to know; to spare his mother; to keep from seeming too sympathetic; she had a lot of reasons, all of them withering under the General's brutal tone. In her lightness after whatever happened last night, Rey had forgotten what she’d been keeping from the General. 

“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry for not telling you before. His living conditions have never been good, but when we communicated last night — “ She didn’t know what kind of detail to go into, but Chewie made a pained sound and she pushed on: “They’ve been cutting on him, ma’am, carving things into his back.”

The transmission carried the coldest silence Rey had ever heard: “Carving what?”  
  
Rey stuttered, wishing she’d kept the details to herself: “Ma’am, I don’t know if —“

“Rey, if we’re going to run a sympathy campaign for my son, argue he’s suffered enough for his crimes, I need to know what’s going on. I don’t know why you’ve kept it from me, kept it from everyone, but that needs to stop now.” Her voice softened. “I don’t know who made you feel we weren’t on the same side here, but I want Ben back — in one piece and repentant — and I’m willing to do the work to make that happen. The Chriss are prison planet merchants, but they aren’t known as butchers, so if I have the details of his treatment, I can use some of my diplomatic contacts to get more information. But I need you to give it to me.”

Rey closed her eyes, seeing the blood on his black robe, under her nail beds, and said: “'Sith Lord.' They were carving Sith Lord over and over into his back.”

Leia’s voice was gentle when she asked: “And how do you know that, Rey?” 

Rey choked, words not coming out, when she felt Chewbaca’s massive hand between her shoulder blades, the warm pressure steadying her heartbeat, helping her get air into her lungs. She felt a bit of that lightness, a bit of that control born of gentleness, and found her voice, leaning closer to the microphone so she could be heard:  
  
“Every night, we meet in dreams, back on Ahch-To, underwater at first. I can, I can control the dreams, can save him from drowning, but I can’t control what state he shows up to the dream in, which seems to correlate with what they’d done to him that day. I’ve seen him beaten, cut-on, burned, chilled, starved and humiliated." She laid her head on her forearm, Chewie’s broad hand her only anchor to the world as memories flooded over her. She heard herself say: “It’s getting worse, Ma’am; they’re not giving him as much time to heal; they kept him awake for 3 days before last night. If they stop him sleeping entirely, I won’t be able to help him, won’t be able to see him —“ and she caught her tongue between her teeth, breathing harsh as Chewie wrapped his long arm around her shoulder.

“I just want to get him out of there.” She said, voice low and firm. 

She heard Leia pause and then:  “We will, Rey. Your idea of biasing the jury pool is a good one, but we may be able to do more than that. His treatment at the Chriss’s hands is either a fulfillment of their contract with the First Order, which will make excellent propaganda to pull away their support from wavering planets; or it's a violation of that contract, in which case we may be able to get some clandestine help from the First Order in his retrieval.” There was a pause, and her voice modulated back down from General to mother. “And Rey, I’m going to ask you to do something difficult. I need to you write down what’s happening to him — tell him you’re doing this, and why. It sounds like you’re helping him, or he wouldn’t keep inviting you into his dreams. I don’t want to abrogate that relationship. But I’m going to start a daily memo on his status, to build support for him here and to keep our contacts fully informed. And I hope it will help you too. I know it can feel like you’re helping, keeping things like this to yourself, like you’re protecting the people around you, but this much hurt is too much for any one person to carry. That’s why he’s reaching out to you. And that’s why you need to _tell your team_. Not just Chewie, Finn and Poe too. They need to understand what you’re going through.”

Rey felt wrung-out, her bones wobbly with exhaustion, as she said: “Yes, Ma’am, I’ll try.”

“Good girl,” Leia said, and then called out to her steward, who Rey realized was probably listening to this whole thing: “Expect to get regular reports on my son’s status and distribute them as widely as possible. There will be resistance and anger and Calrissian will complain. I'll handle him. That's what we’re signing up for. But we’re going to do it, because it may be the only way to get him home.”

“And Rey?” She heard the General ask as she was wondering if she should close the comm line since the General seemed done with her. “Do not ever keep something like this from me about my son again or you will see a side of me you will not like. Are we kyber-crystal clear?”

Rey gulped and promised: “Of course, Ma’am.” The comm line went dead and Rey sucked in a huge breath, Chewbaca’s arm across her back. She reached up and patted his shoulder, saying:

“That went well,” before collapsing back in her chair as he made sympathetic noises.

—

Altum was a study in greys, mostly desert with a few stubs of mountains from what Rey had seen of it from the Falcon’s perch on its largest satellite moon. Their spy, Amid Aresh, was a shuttle driver who they had been told was disillusioned with his home world’s primary industry and hoping for help getting new work outside of the prison industrial complex. Amid told Rey and Finn the day's plan as he wove his shuttle through green-tinted clouds on their way to the rolling sand dunes on the surface:

“Your cover will be as executors of a Corellian billionaire’s estate, charged with investing his riches to sustain his grandchildren for their entire lives. That will also protect the Millennium Falcon, since I believe she still maintains her Correlian flag beacon,” Rey knew it was one beacon among dozens from other worlds she 'maintained', but didn’t feel the need to share that.

“I’ve arranged for an investor tour; they always bring the money through the nicest parts, the visitors’ center, the gym. Then they’ll scare you, take you into the yard, tell you everyone here are rapists and murderers — this is a medium-security planet, mostly blasphemers from the more religious worlds, a few in for tax fraud, some folks from the First Order who were in mid-level positions and got caught.” He slipped a grin their way, his red teeth bright in his blue, roundish face: “I told them you have a beef with the First Order and were particularly interested in seeing their condition; I told them it was a major selling point, getting to use some of your client’s money to punish their kind.”

Amid leaned forward as they reached the surface above the prison block, double-ears wiggling with focus, as he slotted them into a parking-spot on the top of a long, low, flat building that was made to look like part of a dune. As he finished fiddling with the controls, he said:

“I got the update, just before I picked you up, that there’s accusations that the Chriss are torturing Kylo Ren. That bastard deserves it after what he did to Hosnian Prime, but I’ve never seen our people do something like that. And if we did —“ He shook his head before turning to them with a hopeful look, “Are you getting me out of here? My handler said I had to wait, that I knew things about the Chriss that no one else could, but, look, if we’re torturing people, I want out.” His eyes were wide, concentric irises flaring in what Rey thought was a pleading look for his species.

She shook her head; better to be honest than get his hopes up. “We’re only going further into Chrissian space,” she said, “Nowhere that will be safe for you to go. But we’ll tell the General what a help you’ve been; and your handler is right, we have so few true contacts in the Chriss confederation, you may be our only hope of getting Kylo Ren back and harnessing his power for the resistance.”

Amid shook his head: “Good luck with that, ma’am; a bastard like him is better-off spaced than sucking oxygen.” Right as he was about to open the door, he smacked himself in the face, oversized palm making a wet slapping sound on his nubbed skin.

“Oxygen! I forgot. Altum's external atmosphere is mostly nitrogen — you’ll suffocate in seconds. Silly gilly, I forgot — it’s rare we get O2 breathers out here, most of our investors are other Chriss. There are some rebreathers in the back, in the purple packets.”

Rey gave Finn wide eyes that he returned, mouthing ‘silly gilly?’ before they both turned to the back of the shuttle to unpack the rebreathers.

Rey was fond of sand, even this colorless stuff, though she declined to mention this to Finn as he huffed and puffed as they walked over the gently-shifting dunes. There was something honest about it; it would kill you and no one would find your sunbleached bones, but at least it was upfront about what it was. Water hid a world under its surface; at a certain depth, the ocean is as deadly as the void of space. They made it into the compound untouched; Amid had made them sound high ranking enough that no one checked them for weapons.

They left Amid in the pristine, empty visitor’s center, the chairs still in their plastic shipping wrap, though it might have been part of some Chriss fashion Rey didn’t recognize. She and Finn unhooked their rebreathers on the promise that the rest of the base was self-contained and had been adjusted to their oxygen preferences — Chriss could breath a wide range of chemicals without ill-effect and, apparently, really wanted their fictional money.

The tour went just as Amid had expected, starting in the gym where Rey saw dozens of species using different kinds of weights and stretching machines. It seemed civil, like a scene from a school on a long-settled planet like Corellia or Bosnian Prime; it was nothing like she'd ever seen on Jakku. The tour guide told them all the prisoners were rapists and murderers, and both Rey and Finn kept straight faces. Then they turned a corner to the first cell block they had seen, one entirely made-up of members of the First Order.

“The cells are large enough for most standard-sized species to walk 3 paces in, following the old Republic’s requirements, and only the largest Chriss can touch their hands to both walls at the same time.” The guide nodded, as if confirming to himself that this was a form of pure leniency. In a lower voice he said:

“I believe Amid mentioned you have a special interest in investing with us because we maintain custody over some select First Order combatants, yes?” Finn nodded, taking his cue, allowing Rey to focus on searching the Force for any sign of Ben.

“Yes, our client was killed on Hosnian Prime and while his descendants are uninterested in politics, they would like some of his fortune to be invested away from their First Order interests,” he lied smoothly. “We wanted to make sure their conditions are, shall we say, appropriate.”

Rey thought he was laying on the posh accent a little thick, but she doubted the Chriss would notice.

Their guide’s eyes widened, perhaps in surprise, perhaps in offense: “As I said, all of our cells conform to the old Republic’s standards as do our protocols for prisoner treatment. You can see,” and he walked them into the cell block, gesturing upwards, “they are treated appropriately.”

There were three levels of cells in this part of the block, each one with 3 duracrete walls and an open, barred wall, facing inwards in a giant oval with catwalks connecting them and fortified gates spaced periodically. Rey could feel nothing of Ben here, no hint of his Force signature. She kept trying, peering into one of the cells. Inside was a human man, lying on a bed, staring at a monitor on the wall. There was a messy desk with notebooks and stubby pencils.

She spoke in a low voice: “And what role did most of your prisoners play in the First Order?”

The guide replied, voice loud and uncaring if the men in the cages heard him: “All Storm Troopers; some commanded regiments that were captured, some were raised recruits. They don’t really have minds of their own after a certain point in the training; but better keep them safely locked away than out there in the galaxy where they might cause trouble.”

The man in the cell pressed a button and the channel changed; some kind of Coruscantian re-run. Rey felt a chill in her bones as she counted the cells and ran the math— a thousand men, in this block alone, none ranked higher than a Storm Trooper. There but for the grace of Poe Dameron might have gone Finn. She shuddered and couldn’t help some of her disgust tinting her tone when she asked:   
  
“And Force users? How are they treated?”  
  
Their guide’s face contorted and he spat, purple goo sliding down the bar of the human’s cell. The man glanced up, eyes vague, looking Rey over from chest to knees, back to her chest before drifting back to his monitor.

“We don’t keep nasty Force users here — there are only two Chriss installations equipped to handle those freaks.” Rey wanted to shake him, to make him tell them their names, but Finn shot her a look and she settled. She waited, letting her silence do the asking.

The guide looked up thoughtfully and said: “Kambando and Naka-Daka, I think those are the two. Either Naka-Daka or Nauticus, I can never remember which. In any case, unless you have any questions, I believe Amid was going to take you to the commissary?”

Finn and Rey nodded, Rey repeating those three planet names over and over to herself with every step: Kambando, Naka-Daka, Nauticus. Those were the planets where she might find Ben Solo.

—

That night, she fell into an exhausted sleep, grey sand from her clothes sprinkling her mattress as she’d been too tired to even change, the healing in the dream catching-up with her hard on the shuttle home. Finn let her nap on his shoulder as Amid chattered about the kinds of jobs he'd like to have in the resistance when his time as a spy was up and Finn was dutifully noncommital.

When Rey opened her eyes Ben was right there, right in front of her. He was fighting, in the water, fighting something she couldn’t see. Nothing was around him, nothing choking him, nothing hitting him, but he was struggling, face wild — she dove towards him, shoving a message at him: _You’re in a dream, remember, Ben? This is a dream._  

She floated in front of him, just out of his grasp, and for the barest seconds he was still, his oak-dark eyes set on her and his face frozen and then — it crumbled and she closed the distance, wrapping an arm around his belly, getting her grip before swimming up with enough force that her shoulder  _shoved_ him in the armpit. He startled and she felt him begin to kick, begin to help. When they broke the surface under the unending arc of chrystaline stars, he breathed in huge, gasping breaths, eyes still wide and searching. When she tried to let him swim on his own, he surged closer to her, refused to break contact, so they swam together towards the cave’s shore, his shoulder close to hers, his hand on her arm as they clambered up the well-worn rocks, not letting her out of his touch. 

This time, he set the fire this time, still burning the wood she’d collected in past dreams. He unhooked his cloak, lay it where it could drip-drain in the moonlight before sitting beside her. He looked around the cave, taking it in like it was new, shoulder tight against hers as they sat, watching the fire.

“I rested better, last night,” he said, his voice hoarse, eyes fixed on the translucent cave wall where she'd nearly learned the truth about her parents. She nodded.

“Me too, though today was long.” He quirked an eyebrow at her and she relayed her conversation with the resistance, that she would be telling them what was happening to him. She didn't say who she spoke with to avoid a fight, watching as his face froze, his breathing kicked-up, and then seeing the moment he took control over himself, eyes too-casually drifting back to the fire, arms around his knees. 

“We think you’re on one of three planets — Kambando, Naka-Daka, or Nauticus. Any idea which it might be?”  
  
He shook his head, making a sound of frustration. Then took a deep breath and said:  
  
“This sucks.” And she laughed, a peal of pure surprise bursting out of her, and he startled, but before she could smother the sound, he grinned, bumping her shoulder with his and chuckling. “Fine, that’s an understatement. But I don’t want my life, what’s happening to me, to be some kind of bargaining chip for nameless resistance commanders.” Then he lowered his head: “But I need out, and it sounds like this is the way, a compromise. My mother would have approved.”

She raised her hand, slowly moving it towards his shoulder, before patting him gingerly and setting it back behind herself, bracing her weight on it. He leaned into her and when he spoke next, his voice was a near whisper.

“I rested better, but there isn’t an amount of rest that will allow me to survive many more days like yesterday,” he said haltingly, “If they keep me from sleeping, it will start to affect me more, not only because I won’t have time to heal, but because it will take me away from, this time, this place; from you,” he said looking around, looking everywhere but her. “I’ve been getting my hope here.”

He turned towards her and reached out, sliding his fingers to the nape of her neck, not tugging, not pulling, just resting there, eyes meeting hers. Rey’s skin was alight, warmth spreading like she was standing in front of a baking oven, waves of the stuff coming in wafts and drafts, moving up her entire body, emanating from that point, the two square inches of skin where his fingertips tied their bodies together.

She nodded and raised her hand to press fingers tighter against her skin. Slowly, tenderly and barely moving, he relaxed towards her, his forehead coming to rest against her shoulder. One knee fell to the side, and the other nudged against her leg until she let her legs relax, laying one over his as she found their breaths coming in tandem.

Her arm was getting tired from holding both of them up, so she squeezed his fingers where they were still intertwined with hers and said: “Resting in the dream helped me yesterday, maybe it will help you tomorrow, if you'd like to.” 

He froze, leg still touching hers, then he slid away and she was — cold. Not the cold of clammy clothes, but the cold of a lost connection. A moment later, he was back, his still-damp cloak wadded into a pillow that he tucked under his head as he lay down on his back, the crackling warmth of the fire beside him. Then he sat up, adjusting the cloak until there was room on it for both of their heads. She looked at him for a moment, considering, and then lay back. Slower than breathing, light on the ground, he rolled his head to take a measure of something -- in her or in him, she didn't know -- before rolling onto his side, facing away from her and holding himself very, very still. His massive back was to her and all she could think of was that it was probably nowhere near healed in the waking world. She put a gentle hand on his hip and he startled, badly.

She rushed to say: “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to -- you can just rest —“

“No, now I know it’s coming, it’s ok,” he said, his voice a little higher, but still meant to be reassuring.

He held himself stiff as she nudged herself forward until the length of her body was a hair’s breadth from him. She could smell him this close, mostly seaweed and sweat, but something else, something sharp, something rich that she remembered from the interrogation room, remembered from the fight in Snoke’s chamber. She moved laid her hand on his side again and this time he sighed, setting his head more firmly into the make-shift pillow and easing his ribs into her palm with a tentative breath. Then her hand was sliding across his stomach, curving it over his hip, and her entire chest was full of the sensation, the contact, his body so close to hers. Her back was to the entrance: if anything came through, came for them, she would be the first to defend. It made something primal roll and preen in her belly, this possessiveness, this feeling of protection.

After a few seconds, he took a deep, filling, sleepy breath and his entire back brushed-up again her front. It was her turn to freeze, to press her tongue to the roof of her mouth, to try to will away the heat in her belly trickling down between her legs, trying to keep her molten rushing pulse cool. Trying to act regular, she match his next breath, and followed it as it forced her into deep, meditative breathing, since his lungs were so much bigger than hers and his exhausted breathing slower. To steady herself, she listed the prison planets they’d been to, the ones they hadn’t; she thought about Kambando, Naka-Daka, and Nauticus, and tried to focus on them, rather than the feeling of his body relaxing under her arm, muscle-by-muscle group gentling. There was a brief moment when his entire body tensed before falling into a restful sleep. With him out, she let herself settle a little, moulding herself to him, pressing the tops of her thighs to the backs of his, her chest closer to the skin she’d run her fingertips over and over as she healed it yesterday. She buried her face in the dampness of his hair to keep from thinking about that, her eyes closed, fire warming her arm across his stomach and his body warming her everywhere else.

When she was absolutely sure he was asleep and had been for a while, she whispered, too low to be heard over the crackling of the fire: “I swear to the Maker, I will set you free.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a chance to see a bit more of the world, get a better sense of what Rey and the team will need to overcome if they're going to get to Ben in-time. In case it's not obvious, the Chriss, their economics, religion, and worlds come from my brainpan, not the ah, extensive Star Wars-related book collection I have access to through my family. Seriously, I said I'd joined this fandom and my brother came back with a banker's box of 'reference texts' and dog-eared paperbacks 'to get me started.' Also, I made the ysalamiri purple because I like purple.
> 
> There's violence in this chapter and incarceration. It's also tagged up above, but this is a reminder to check the tags. I'm happy to add any extra tags I'm missing.

The next day was spent in travel to Naka-Daka, half a day’s journey from Altum through a convenient hyperlane. They lucked out — Amid’s cousin worked at the only installation holding Force-sensitives and was willing to play the same game, with the same cover. As Rey and Poe spiraled the ocean-world through its rough the atmosphere, Rey's first report to General Organa was making its way through encrypted channels to the resistance base:

“He knows the plan and understands why we’re doing it. He was better, today. They let him rest sometimes, let him heal so he doesn’t die. He doesn’t know which of the three planets he’s on. I’ll try for more tonight.”

Coasting in the shuttle to the blue-green surface of the planet, Rey felt a tug, something familiar and she pressed her face to the transperasteel: it looked just like Ahch-To, but rather than a scattering of archipelagoes, this world had one large continent, everything else worn down to stubs by violent, 30 meter waves smashing across world-drowning seas. This was an old system, an old world that was cooling, its warming volcanism long-since died out. The planet was only survivable for humans because of a forever-storm that rained water the temperature of blood, trapping the heat from the blue sun’s wavering rays between the surface and the sounding sea. Finn had told her all of this as part of his research into the planet and the customs of the worlds they would infiltrate in their search for Ben. Rey loved seeing her friend deep in his files, pulling together histories and details for his team. She thought that sometimes, Finn dug so deep because he wondered if the next world was the one he’d come from, imagining a life unmoved.

Finn was buried into his research for the next planets, so on this trip, Poe was her fellow faux-Corellian. Poe was fun to travel with, spinning yarns once they were on the surface that enticed their guide into giving tidbit after tidbit of information about how Force users were handled: the Chriss use ysalamiri, giant lizards who naturally projected a barrier that denied Force-sensitives any connection to the Force for a dozen meters on either side of them. Their guide, a tall, flirty Chriss woman with teal-skinned and ruby-red teeth, told Poe their prison had sensitives on staff who could sense any disturbances; they had entirely different protocols for transport; they did regular pysche-testing for the guards, to ensure they hadn't been influenced. Rey had kept her eyes on the prison, counting corners, studying studs to see where they might need to blow a hole, avoiding the eyes of the prisoners who watched her walk free of restraints. She tuned back in when the guide was telling Poe about Chriss religious New Year’s celebrations:

“That’s the only night of the year all of our prisoners can request to go outside, with appropriate breathing apparatus of course.” She turned Poe a wicked smile and Rey had to swallow to keep her bile down. “Only those prisoners who know of our customs know to ask, but any who ask may go outside for a few minutes to watch the standard year turn over, as a demonstration of our culture's charity and fraternity.”

Rey asked, voice flat: “When is the Chriss New Year again?” The guide turned startled eyes to her; it was the first she'd spoken during the whole tour.

“I forget how ignorant apostates can be — it’s in a week. Our preparations are nearly ready,” and she babbled off about the specially imported food and decorations. A few minutes later, Poe had gotten her back on the topic of Force-users:

“We only have one Force-user here on Naka-Daka at the moment, Jyndan Ingo,” their guide said: “He was a fluke, only one in his family to feel the call to evil,” and Rey kept her face straight. “Would you like to meet him? He’s an old man now, but he enjoys visitors.” Her voice was a mix of condescension and fondness.

Poe looked at Rey, who turned to their guide: “What was he convicted of?”

“Oh,” the guide said, face darkening to navy and lowering her voice, “I never ask that question. But I heard he escaped the Death Star; or maybe he was on the wrong side of something when he was a young man, got caught-up with the wrong influences. It was all a long time ago.”

They turned a corner and for a moment, Rey thought they were under attack. She couldn't hear, couldn't see, couldn't  _feel_. Only Poe’s hand on her elbow kept her steady and moving forward. After a few harsh breaths, during which their guide continued to chatter about the trade prices for the ysalamiri, the world came in, colorless, muted, vacant. Rey wanted to run back, run as far as she needed to -- because what this was, this sensory amputation, was the experience of the world without the Force. She had lived with its presence, its hum, its glow, its embrace, her entire life, long before she knew there was a name for it or ways to use it to influence and alter the world; it had been her constant companion, her only truly long-term relationship. It was more a part of her any any given limb, and it was  _gone._

She tried to look normal as she struggled to adjust, but mustn't have been doing a very good job of it because Poe yanked her arm down, making her squat beside him to look at one of the ysalamiri. It was a meter-long violet lizard with a thickly-scaled mauve underbelly and fine, almost frilly scales leading to a ridge on its back. It was surrounded by plants growing in sturdy, handmade wooden boxes. The scent of wet earth, the dry smell of all reptiles, and something sweet, almost floral, flowed around her. The creature had wide, intelligent brown eyes and a forked tongue that was a dozen centimeters long that it flicked through the bars to taste her scent. She froze, wondering if it would give her Force-sensitivity away, but it just nodded to her and waddled away to sleep into a small pool of water. Knowing the being keeping her from the Force wasn't full of malice, that it couldn't help its abilities any more than she could hers, gave Rey the strength to stand up, to rejoin the conversation. Poe was pattering to distract their guide:  
  
"Those beauties, how much did you say they went for again? Are they native here or imported?" The guide's hand was on his arm and he was leaning in; Rey couldn't decide if she was going to tease him about it in front of Finn or not; she never knew if Poe liked this sort of attention, or just turned this on like she'd flick on a lightsaber, to get the job done.

She wandered further on. There were only six cells in this section of the prison, empty ones had been turned into what looked like nurseries for the ysalamiri, baby critter scampering around their parents, waddling through overflowing food bowls and baby-sized pools of water. Rey almost  thought the littlest ones were cute, with pudgy purple bodies as long as her foot, their yellow spots rimmed with orange, and their soft eyes watching her sleepily; except that she still felt like someone had taken a lung, weighed her down with sandbags, and then blindfolded her.

She reached the end of the cellblock and there was a man standing at the bars, watching her closely.

Jyndan Ingo eyes were dark and deeply set into a heavily wrinkled face. His body was stooped, though when her eyes adjusted to the dim light of his table lamp, she realized it probably wasn’t from abuse, but rather a life of reading. Every wall of his large cell was covered in well-built, nicely-maintained bookshelves, filled to the edges. She spotted a half-dozen galactic languages on their spines and topics ranging from history to law. His hand was warm and dry in hers, his eyes kind.

“The other cells are usually full of my books as well,” Jyndan said, his voice a warm growl, “But it’s nesting season, so I had the guards box the books up to make way for the babies.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a sweet and tossed it to one of the littlest ysalamiri. Its scaly skin flashed bright pink and its little legs wriggled as it licked the sugary thing up. “I didn’t want them to be separated from their families too soon.” 

Reys eyes filled with tears, the ysalamiri’s radiation field must be affecting her emotions as well. Jyndan nodded, understanding and giving her time to compose herself. Poe and their guide were still meandering up the corridor towards them.

“What have you learned here?” She asked, looking at all of his books and papers. He looked at her and seemed to make a decision. When he spoke, this time his voice was strong, his diction precise like he'd had elocution training and like these were thoughts he'd worked and worked-over in his mind thousands of times before speaking them aloud:

“I have learned that what I was taught, by people I followed who brought me here, was only the taste of a raindrop of the tsunami of knowledge that living things have acquired. I have learned that are so many ways of being, and there are as many ways of being broken as there are of building back up again.” He grinned brightly, white teeth crooked and she couldn’t help but smile back. “Also, I have learned that it is possible to set others free without being freed yourself.”

Their guide broke in, a fond smile transforming her face and making Rey reconsider her evaluation of her: “Jyndan is quite the jail-house lawyer — he argued in front of the Chriss Supreme Council, it must have been, what, four seaosns ago?" She asked and Jyndan nodded. She continued, smiling: "He made his case that, now the religious lines have shifted on Chriss Prime, thousands of former blasphemers should have their sentences commuted; there are a lot of Chriss back home with their families because of his work, including my aunt.”

Jyndan smiled politely back at the guide and then looked at Rey again, eyes intent. Then he nodded and stepped back, rummaging through a pile of books under his warmly-quilted wooden bed. He pulled out a slim black book and flipped it open to a full color photo of — some kind of bowl? Rey leaned closer, Poe at her elbow.

“Have you ever seen one of these?” Jyndan asked, eyes bright. Rey shook her head.

He tilted the book towards her: “It’s a way to repair broken things. A master potter might spend a week or a month making a single vase. Then, one step after taking it cooling from the kiln, step on the cat and drop it, breaking it in two. He could throw it away and many would. But this pot was broken on a world where the ceramicists have decided that rather than throwing away shards, they repair them. Not with glue and not to hide the broken place, but _to highlight them_.” 

And as he tilted the slim book, she saw what he meant: the grey hand-thrown bowl in the picture had cracks filled with gold.

Jyndan voice dropped to a whisper, a tone so low she thought perhaps only she and Poe could hear it: “It’s not just that,” he said, “The repair is always done with gold, but sometimes the bowl is _dark_ and sometimes it is _light_. But what reconnects it is always heated and hardened metal. The power, that _Force_ that binds the broken pieces together, can sometimes look light against the dark, or dark against the light. It’s about contrast,” he said this last part very slowly, “It’s about the balance, not only between, but _within_.”

Then Jyndan stepped back, pressing the book into her hands. “Keep this — and write me sometime. I get new books every few weeks, but news from the world above, well, that is something I would treasure.”

Rey nodded, Poe already getting the best process to get in contact with him lined up with their guide. She tucked the slim book under her top, close to her skin. Getting her connection to the Force back after leaving Jyndan's cellblock was like the the day she'd gone outside to drink the dew that formed in the shadows of the dunes after the breath of R'iia, what the Teedos called the bone-scouring summer sandstorms on Jakku, had trapped her in her AT-AT for two days; sweet pain, sweet relief. The walk back to the shuttle was long and slick through the pouring body-warm rain, Rey holding onto the book and wondering what was happening to Ben right now.

When Amid’s cousin dropped them back at the Falcon, Rey very carefully, very deliberately walked back to her room, locked the door, set the black book in a clear area under her bed, then smashed her hands into her pillow until the fabric tore. She kept doing it until the entire thing was a feathery mess, and she kept going until misjudged her distance and broke the skin on her hand on the edge of the bed.

She went back outside at dinner time to eat her half-portion with the others. They watched her carefully; she didn't normally spend long hours in her room with the door closed. Finn cleared his throat, looking to Poe.

“Uh, Rey.” He waited until she looked up, then continued, voice soft. “What did you do to your hand?”

She looked down, the bandage slipping, the dark-purple bruises showing through. She ducked her head:

“It’s just — it’s frustrating, not finding him, not getting anywhere, wasting time. And those _prisons_ , that _man,_ he’s helpless there, has spent his whole life there, and no one’s coming to visit him, no one’s looking for him, _no one else cares_ and —“

Chewie put his hand on her shoulder and she tensed, seeing that Finn wasn’t done.

His voice was soft but firm when he said: “Something’s changed, in how you’re communicating with him, Rey, hasn’t it? It’s been, different, more intense, the past day or so. You’re _changing_ Rey, you’re getting closer to him, taking stuff about him personal and —“”

Poe broke in: “It’s weird, is what it is. You’re not going darkside, I can see that. I’ve seen it go that way before, and this is not that. But it’s like you have —“

“Sympathy for the devil,” Finn said. “When we started, this was about accessing an intelligence asset; or, at least, that’s what it _sounded_ like we were signing up for.”

Poe jumped in: “But now you’re talking about saving _him_. About what _he’s_ going through. I heard about the communique to Leia, heard updates on him are going to start going out to all of the commanders with the morning briefing. And my thing is — what happens if we don't get him? How did this mission get so personal?”

Rey was silent, mind burning red and hot that she had to have this conversation, that she hadn’t had it before now, that she had hours before she could sleep again, see if he was even alive. Poe lay his hands flat on the table, leaning forward until Chewie growled at him and he leaned back again. Chewie’s arm was a warm press along her back and she tipped her head onto his shoulder briefly in thanks.

Poe spoke, voice calmer: “We know you’re stepping into his dreams, but we don’t know what happens between you two when you’re asleep.” He waved his arms in front of his face. “I’m not trying to judge, but we’re here for you, above him, above everything but the cause. So, what has he been doing to you, these past few days?”  
  
And Rey’s eyes widened — she hadn’t thought, hadn’t realized — her friends thought Ben was _hurting_ her. She shook her head, looking at the table.

“You’re right, we meet in dreams,” she started, trying to explain. “We fought, yes, for the first week; when we were fighting, I didn’t know why we were meeting, I didn’t know where he was, what was happening to him. I would just fall asleep, wake up under water, get to the shore, and we would fight.” She closed her eyes, remembering:

“Then, one night, we — didn’t. We didn’t fight. It was like the rules of the dream changed. We talked, not about secrets or strategy, and he looked out through the entrance of the sea cave on Ahch-To and said: ‘This is the first time I’ve seen a star in a week.’” 

She remembered how cold that had made her feel, how distant from him. She shook her head again, trying to get herself to refocus: “I asked him why, was he in secret meetings, plotting to hurt my friends again? And he,” her hands formed into fists, bruises aching; Chewie’s hand moved on her back gently: 

“He said, ‘No, Hux had be drugged at my coronation dinner and dropped-off on a Chriss prison planet. I’ve been here since about a week after Crait.’” And she saw Poe wince, remembered how many of his friends had been hurt, killed, all on Kylo Ren’s orders while she and Chewie flew above it all, trying to help and not doing enough.

She looked Poe in the eye: “I didn’t believe him and he didn’t expect me to. The next night, we started to fight again but he was, off. I pressed my advantage, slashed him with my lightsaber; but when he fell, he didn’t get-up. I stood over him, waiting; his lightsaber extinguished and he didn't try to turn it on again. I hadn’t killed him, hadn’t really been trying too — the fights had become more like training bouts, and I don’t have anyone at that level to practice with otherwise. Finally, I asked him when he was going to get up, and he didn’t snark, he didn’t crow, he just lay there. Knowing it was a dream, figuring I could wake-up if it was a trap, I knelt down beside him, stones so cold on my knees, and saw blood on the rocks, so much blood. It was all over his hand, coming down his arm, from under his ridiculous sleeves.” She rolled hers up as an example:

“There were these patterns, hashes and slashes of cuts, not like something he’d done to himself, they were up and down his arms. What kind of person would dream himself too hurt to fight? What person would fake the aftermath of torture in a dream?” She asked. The others were silent. She continued:

“I started to believe him. But who would believe me? I’d seen him with my own eyes, seen his torture with my own eyes, but after everything he’d done — you’ve heard everyone we’ve spoken to; Maker, you’ve said it yourselves. Some pain may be the least that he deserves. But I don’t think he deserves to die, not without a chance to defend himself.”

She closed her eyes, memory after memory flashing of his cut and bruised skin, his smiling face, his hope: “He’s a fighter, as much as any of us are, and he deserves the chance to fight back. _They chain him down_. They took his connection to the Force, probably with the same ysalamiri we saw today, Poe. There’s no justice in what’s being done to him. Just pain. And so yes, I sold the General and the commanders on the idea that getting him out might get us valuable intel; the fact that he hasn’t been in charge at all for months was good intel all by itself, more than enough to get us the time and resources they’ve given us. But that's not why I'm going to free Ben Solo.”

She had been avoiding Finn’s eyes; other than Chewie, no one in this room had suffered more lasting harm from Kylo Ren than Finn had. For whatever reason, Chewie had decided to forgive his nephew, or at least, to help save him from his current circumstances. But Finn, it was Finn’s reaction she had dreaded, his reaction to her empathy for a man who had willingly caused so much pain.

Now she looked at her friend. Finn’s eyes were hard, but there was some understanding in them. She tried to sum-up what she'd been saying, to make sure she got it clear: 

“You asked what I do in his dream: every night, I save him from drowning. I find him, nearly dead, under the water in a cave on Ahch-To; I take him to shore. Sometimes he’s too hurt, too damaged to talk. Sometimes, whatever they do to him doesn’t hurt as much, doesn’t cut as deep. He’s never once asked me for help; I don’t think he believes he deserves to be saved.”

“This is what I was asking you about yesterday, Poe: every night, I have to choice to let him die. The rules of the dream feel clear: if I see him drowning right in front of me and don't save him, he will die in the waking world. Then this whole thing would be over. That would let him be free, let him fade away into the Force, to haunt me or not, whatever it is he ended up doing, this broken, fragile, fucked-up man. But I don’t sense in him the will to die. I sense the will to live. And I don't think he deserves what's happening to him.”

Finn took a deep breath, and spoke: “Like I said, I’m here for you first. I don’t believe in torture, even for torturers, even for people who rode high in the system that took me from my family. But Rose told me that we’re we won’t win by fighting what we hate, but by saving what we love. I’m not saying any of us love Kylo Ren, but I’m absolutely not in love with the idea of Leia and Han’s son suffocating on water or being tortured to death alone while you have to watch it happening to him. So, yeah, we’ll continue on with the mission,” he said, Poe nodding confirmation. “But you need to tell us, if things start to change, get worse; you need to let us know.”

Rey nodded and stood, needing some air. Chewie’s hand dropped from her back and she smiled at him before nodding to her friends and heading to the med bay to check supplies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter has a long Rey-Ben section, but I needed to get some of these pieces in place for the later arcs. I wouldn't usually do this, but the next chapter is going to include a lot of rough stuff. If anyone wants to skip it, please do and let me know you'd like a synopsis in the comments. 
> 
> For the next chapter, I've been trying -- as someone who needs trigger warnings herself -- to think of how I would most want what I wrote covered. I'm going to do something a little different. The note at the top of the next chapter will include a re-emphasis of the warnings at the top. But the paragraphs where things get really hairy, I'm going to make in white font, so the reader has to highlight them to read them, so no one gets their eyeballs caught while trying to scroll past. This may be more my anxiety than anything else, but I want to know I did my best to be protective of my wonderful readers. UPDATE: I tried to make it in white font, but it didn't take. I ended up putting lots of white space above and below the more graphic descriptions. I hope that helps.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading and for your comments, they give me life. I'm posting at twice my planned pace because of the feedback I've gotten, so: thank you. 
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: This is a rough chapter for Ben and Rey. I care deeply about none of my readers being harmed by my words so I'm putting an extra hard trigger warning on this chapter. This is a chapter where the hard sexual assault trigger warning at the top is necessary; it's all descriptions after the fact, but could be triggering for some readers. I've made the paragraphs where those descriptions come in surrounded by a lot of blank lines so you can scroll past easily. If you want to get a summary of what happens in this chapter but aren't able to read it, leave me a comment and I would be happy to summarize it.
> 
> I struggled with whether to include this scene, about whether it's needed, but as of right now, what I can say is that this is how I imagined this going and happening, which is why it's in the story. Please take care of you and if you don't want to read it, I won't be sad or upset. The next chapter is a bit lighter, but things are going to get worse for Ben Solo before they get better.

That night, Rey found Ben closer to the bones of the razorback leviathan on the bottom of the cove than she ever had before. He was drifting, eyes shut. She grabbed his wrist, her lungs already burning and pulled him up; he was slack, unconscious, unmoving. All she wanted to do was shake him, zap him back into consciousness, shout at him to fight her, to swim with her, to do something other than being a limp sack of potatoes for her to carry. Instead, she dragged him up the shore, pumped the water from his lungs while trying not to add to the new watercolor of bruises across his chest; she kept-at-it until he was coughing, still not waking, but certainly breathing. Tonight he was wearing only his pants, feet bare, pale and long in the moonlight. She got the fire going, envisioned a thick blanket under them and a thicker one around him until they materialized, and folded her legs to wait and meditate.

When he awoke, the moon had made a quarter of its habitual journey across the entrance of the cave. He fought the blanket over him, crawling to stumble to the far side of the cave, only to sit with the stone at his back, huddling with his knees against his chest. Rey stared, frozen. When Ben had turned his back on her, she had seen dark bruises that looked like handprints over the pale skin of his hips, his lower back, on his spine. His eyes were bright, alert, but when she moved towards him, he flinched away so hard his head hit the rock. Rey backed way off, putting the fire between them, and he seemed to slow down. After a few moments, he spoke. It being him, they weren't happy words:

“Do you ever feel that dimness of the soul?” He asked, voice entirely shot, all harsh whispers and sudden bursts of sound. She cringed inside at what could make him sound like that.

“I get downhearted sometimes, if that’s what you mean,” she said, and he shook his head.

“I’m talking about grey times,” he said, then shook his head again, just a little, but enough that she could feel the pain when his face spasmed at the motion. “Not grey fading into darkness as-in the dark side, but inner darkness, the shading of the world that lets us see death without wincing, lets us feel pain without flinching, lets us see the world as it is, or as the worst parts of it are.”

She thought of the long, moonless nights on Jakku, of feeling she knew the truth of the world and that truth was a terrible one, that all people were made-up of darkness and the few, rare, fleeting kindnesses of the world might as well be accidents for how common and how ineffectual they were.

“Are you asking if I get depressed?” She asked, and he grimaced, either at her use of simple language or some slicing, inner pain she couldn’t reach.

“I do,” she said, continuing: “I have. I am, right now, actually,” and he froze, shifting backwards into the wall. Maybe he thought it was catching; maybe he thought there was something about his presence that was throwing her off her center; maybe he was hurt. She tried to continue the conversation he'd started, to draw him out:

“Depression is just chemicals in my brain, at least, that’s how I learned about it,” she said, and his eyes were on hers, dark and in-pain and she just wanted to  _fix_ ; but cracks in people can't be glued together, they need to be rebound with something else, something of both fire and water.  “When I’m depressed, the world is darkly lit, surprisingly unsurprising; I find myself expecting all evil. I don’t let myself dwell on good things, can’t bring myself to be happy for even a few minutes at a time.” She thought her voice might be too clinical, too vague. She sighed and looked into the fire.

“I know, in my top-brain, those grey-days will pass; that everything in this world passes. I don’t let myself make big changes until I’m out of the gloom, until I can give myself the time and space to re-heal.” She paused, trying to remember how she thought about it, sending her words out like darts, like shots from a blaster kilometers way, trying to hit a mugger before his knife landed.  “I think of it as holding space, for myself, like I would for someone else. If a friend is sick, or hurt, or captive,” and she glanced again towards his huddled form pressing tight into the unyielding safety of the wall, “or if they're dying or missing, I don’t get angry at them for not being what I want or need in that moment. Because nearly everyone will come back, if you give them enough space.”

His voice was raw, harsh, but there was a thread of understanding: “That makes sense. But what if I really hate waiting?”

And Rey chuckled, voice dark: “That hate is part of depression; but so is caring for the soft animal of your body.” 

“What does that mean?” He asked and she rubbed her fingers across her forehead, pinching the skin.

“It’s something Chewie says, that’s the translation I think. He says ‘You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’ I think about that when everything hurts, like it does now, like it might for you.”

“What happens when I can’t get what I want, when what I want is taken from me, when other things are taken from me?” Ben asked, his voice so thin and scared she didn’t know what to do, her pulse thudding in her stomach, bile rising in her throat.

“What I learned in the desert is all sadnesses pass, all depressions fail, nothing keeps us away from our futures forever. Until we find a way to survive, we have to endure and take what we need, with both hands.”

He came to his knees, face a mask of pain, coming closer to the fire, or to her, she wasn’t sure. Around his neck were bright red bruises, fingertips pressed into his throat, from the front and reaching around from behind.

“I want,” he said, hands clenching in his lap, eyes downcast. His voice was full of shame when he said: “I want not to hurt.”

She nodded, getting to her knees. “I will never touch you unless you ask me to, but I can heal you, like last time. It may give you some of that space inside back.” He shook his head and she sat back down. 

“What they did, it’s not the same kind of hurt,” he whispered, something in his voice so wrong, like the conviction that he was alone in this kind of pain. She knew what she would need to do next, the rules of the dream shifting. She said:

“Did you hear the one about the man who fell down into a pit?” He shook his head, his eyes wide, confused at her change in tone, easing closer to the fire. “The man who fell into a pit called out ‘help, help!’ And a priest came by, wrote a prayer down on a piece of paper, and walked away. The man who fell into a pit called out ‘help, help!’ again. And a counselor came by, wrote down some steps on a notecard, and walked away. He called out ‘help, help!” again. And his best friend came by.” She began rolling-up her sleeve. “And his friend jumps down in the hole and the man says: ‘Why’d you do that? Now we’re both stuck down here!’ And his friend says, ‘No, we’re not, because I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’”

Her arm was goose-pimpling in the cool night air. She turned her wrist over, shoving her fingers against the thin skin of her wrist showing a thin, long scar, “I caught a bad batch of rations, made me see things, made me tried to slice my bones out with a flip-knife. I passed-out before making it too far.” She could tell her voice was too flat, to desiccated of feeling.

His face was still in the flickering firelight, unreacting, and she was suddenly too mad, too broken-hearted, too sliced and diced and simply too fucked-up feeling to stop, to ask him what he needed again; she was tired of always keeping space and never _taking_ space, never making clear that she needed room to be a mess sometimes too. She wanted to think she was doing this for him, to show him he wasn’t alone, but part of this was her serving herself up, reminding him: _you’re not here with some perfect Light Being; I’ve been fucked-over too, fucked-up and broken and if you can find a way, night after night after night to the ocean and to me, we might both make it out of this thing alive_.

She spread her fingers wide enough to hurt, pointing to the place where her two middle fingers shook, didn’t spread as far apart:

“See how this finger can’t flex all the way? Unkar thought I should have been able to pull-in twice what I had this week, though I hadn’t because I’d been to scared to go by the new Stormtrooper camp to get to the good scrap, so he took a tin of foodstuffs, had me lay my hand down on the notes counter and —“

And Ben  _winced_ and there was a fascinated, horrible, ugly part of Rey that was overjoyed. _Look, proof I’m too broken to love. If the founder of the Knights of Ren can’t bear to hear me talk about_ my hand _then nothing in me is worth anything; I am nothing, nobody._  The bruises around his neck looked deep, repeated; he couldn't sit in one position for long now that he'd moved away from the wall. He kept shifting, face never still, an open echo of pain. She knew that pain; she had been driven into that pit and found her way out. A madness was settling down on her. She pulled up her tunic, arm stretching high over her head, and turned so he could see a burned handprint over her ribs:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“My first rape,” she said, “was at the hands of a trader. He had these superheated gloves to make cutting through durasteel easier. He grabbed me with one and turned it on, held me where while I screamed and he —" Rey was gasping, feeling his hand on her, _burning_ her, his slimy cock in her mouth, and then she was pulling off her tights, underwear on, and Ben was frozen, staring at her, eyes fixed on — her face? No, she must be understanding, no one had ever looked at her face when her pants were off. She knelt up and gestured to thin scars running like tick marks down her thigh:

“I was taken by a stormtrooper squad on Jakku for a training mission for a month; they thought they needed some local entertainment. It must have been a regular thing with them, since they had a cage already set-up in the compound they were renting. It had durasteel bars I couldn’t shake. A rape a day was their policy to keep from ruining me too quickly, and to keep track, they’d scratch me here, to make sure I was used-up _at the right rate_.” She was breathing hard now, heart pounding, blood echoing cold, like bullets of ice in all the places she wished she could forget being touched, eyes aching as she tried to see past what she remembered.

Her knees were weak, her remaining grip on her thoughts loosening as she remembered being restrained, how they'd hold her hands away from her, how they’d chain her down, slide inside of her when she was screaming, when she was silent, asleep.

Her voice could have cut iron, words like an x-ray through the universe: “It seemed to matter to other people that I tried to escape their compound. It was on the outskirts of town. Then I stopped telling people at all since it seemed like it just made me fair game in their minds. There was no one who’d understand how grateful I was on a day when it was only one of them left, then none, then I was free, their ship heading back to the stars I’d never seen up close.”

She collapsed down to sitting, shoving her tunic in her lap, covering up her scars. Her voice was cracked and rough when she said, detatched, watching a holo in her head that only she knew the theme music for, telling the last part of the story like it was a triumph and the worst thing that had ever happened:

“I was in the sand where they left me, waiting for the sun, a drift of sand to die in, and I could hear someone coming, and I didn’t want to be raped again, didn’t want to be taken to another compound and I — I couldn’t walk, at that point, they’d broken something, something inside, and it had been weeks since I’d been fed right. But I heard this person coming and I — I forced myself to _heal_. It might have been the Force; I thought it was the Maker. That fear got me up, let me hide, helped me get strong. You said the forget the past, to kill it if I had to; but my past is why I am broken in the ways I am; how I know how to heal; it is why I am stronger in the broken places.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She was shaking down in her deepest of bones, thick slurry of memories trying to suck her down, tow her under. Her blood running cold from them, hot from the shame of her display, and then Ben said:

“Ok.” And he crawled towards her, handprints around his neck growing starker the closer he got to the fire. He sat, just out of arm’s reach, then reached his hand out to her, slow, so slow, as slow as she'd touched him to heal the cuts on his back, but his eyes were on hers, amber-hinted in the penumbra of the fire. When she didn't move away, he put his hand on her shoulder, thumb moving in an apology and she flinched back.

“Leave it,” she said, moving away, but he shook his head, moving a bit closer to her, twitches of pain moving across his body like an electrical storm. She watched him, scouring his expression for pity, for disgust. She didn’t see it in him, and didn’t feel anything like it rising in her chest. Just a frisson of understanding.

He was closer now, kneeling in front of her, other arm around his stomach, and she _knew_ , she _knew_ how much it hurt inside, when someone did something like that to you. She was arctic in that moment, thinking of someone holding her hands, holding him down, and she was hovering behind herself, trying to get away, get herself to safety, and she readied herself to run, and he was utterly still, muscles tense, waiting for her to run.

She lifted a hand to where he was holding her shoulder and slipped two fingers to the unbruised inside of his wrist, feeling his blood flow and on the rhythm of his heartbeat she lowered herself back into herself, became aware again of the flow of the Force around them. She slipped a stream of it from the great river and turned it to healing, touched it to his skin, re-stitching muscles, stopping bleeding, soothing aches. She circulated his blood away form the bruises on his hips, his lower back, around his neck. 

He held still, so still, as their fingerprints faded, the wincing way he held himself easing up, the shape of him becoming more balanced, more symmetrical now it was not held in anticipation of pain.

The pain he felt inside was the same as the first pain she’d ever healed in herself, but every time she remembered that day, she felt her healing slow, her grip weaken. And so she thought of other things, brighter things: the sound of BB-8 trundling towards her across the deck of the Falcon; the first meal of a day; the power in her arms when she wielded her old staff; the joy of fixing her lightsaber; the brightness of a new dawn; Ben’s laugh; Ben’s smile; Ben’s unbroken skin moving over muscles built from working. Ben, whole and happy and _free_. She let those memories and yearnings drift in a concurrent current along with her healing Force, slipping her light through his body, stitching together what was broken and leaving a line of bright, hard power where the cracks were. 

When she rose from the flow, when she opened her eyes, she found his, close and searching, his hand no longer on her shoulder but cupping her cheek. She pressed into his mind: _You don’t deserve any of this_. And he replied, _You are not a broken or unloveable. I was wrong; you are not nothing. You are enough. Be kinder to yourself_. 

And he pulled his hand away, her fingers slipping from his wrist, he breathed:

“Believe me.” As he faded into the first light of day.

—

Rey woke up sobbing, hands clenched so tight around the sheets she thought she was going to tear her skin or the fabric if she held on one second longer. She released her grip and felt the blood move in her fingers again, felt the smooth shape of a wrist under her fingers, just for an instant. 

She wanted to stifle the tears, stop herself from falling any further down, stop herself from falling entirely apart, and then she remember what he’d said, about being kind, about being enough, and she turned onto her stomach, arms over her head, and cried, cried until she felt pain alone and no guilt, cried until she felt empty. There was a serenity in crying, an acknowledgement that she was was smaller than some of the things in this world and so much bigger than them at the same time. Her stomach and throat ached from stifling the sound of her sobs and her pillowcase was damp through-and-through, but as her breathing slowed, she felt calmer, clearer than she had in days. Like the knowledge that things pass, this was a reminder that she was affected by emotions but that they might leave her alone if she left herself the space to feel them.

She decided then, that the next time she slept, she would tell Ben he was enough, that he was lovable as well; maybe it would feel like a lifeline to him, the way his words, his touch had been to her.

—

She doesn’t see him for days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Whew*. Things are going to lighten-up in the next chapter, so if that was a bit dark for you, that's not the whole tone of the piece. But as I was editing it, I remembered why this scene meant so much to me. I'll meta ramble happily if folks are interested, just let me know in the comments! Thank you so much for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No intense warnings on this one, some fun action and do-gooding and something special at the end.

Rey had just been drifting after she'd cried herself out, fingers loosening in the sheets, when she heard blaster fire and the Falcon swooped and swirled madly around her. The next 52 hours were spent caught in the middle of a firestorm between a former resistance outpost and a squadron of First Order troopers on a training mission; no time to breathe, no time to send the General her update, no time for anything but twitch-muscle flying and unwavering hope. 'Former resistance outpost' because the training mission had to kill every last one of the resistance fighters and the squadron was now turning on the villagers who’d sold them blankets and food scraps.

Rey knew the four of them in the Falcon couldn’t save everyone, that she couldn’t fix this, but she couldn’t let them kill the villagers either, she couldn’t just _let_ them attack and attack and attack. So she — and Chewie and Finn and Poe — dove into the middle of things, taking the ship places she did not want to go, flipping and flicking and flying and firing through the entire day and the night and — though they did not save everyone — from within the serenity of the Force she knew she had been able to save many, many lives.

The squadron withdrew with heavy losses and Finn said they wouldn’t be coming back until they’d licked their wounds. Chewie was about to take a breath, get back on-course, when the message came through from the villagers: 

“Please, you’ve saved our lives, but it will mean nothing if they come back when you are gone. Please, help us get to the moon.”

Rey overheard the message from under the common room table where she desperately trying to get to sleep, if even for a moment. She knew she'd missed her chance, but she had to try. Chewie and Finn were in the cockpit and Rey felt the Falcon slow as they silently agreed and began to move back towards the doomed planet. Then Rey managed to drop off, like dropping off a cliff, forcing adrenaline to turn into something else in her blood stream, knowing she would pay for it later, forcing herself down, down into the sand of sleep.

When she opened her eyes under the water, there was nothing. She was a flurry of constant movement, not knowing when she'd be wrenched back into wake, hands and eyes and feelings searching, breaking for air before diving back under water, swimming further and further out to sea, circling back to the cove — nothing. She called out to him, shouting across the silence of the ocean's surface: _Ben, Ben, are you there?_

Nothing came back.

Poe shook her awake, his eyes sympathetic, but serious as he crouched under the table.

“The villagers need our help.”

“He wasn’t there, Poe, he wasn’t — what if he --” Rey stuttered, delirious with exhaustion and fear. He helped her to stand and then pulled her to him, his jacket smelling of smoke and sweat and the fancy soap he pretended he'd bought for Finn, hands light on her back. His voice was low, kind but firm:

“Rey, it seems like his captors have a pretty set schedule. I’m guessing you missed the window, saving our butts and all those villagers down there.”

Rey rolled her forehead against the leather of his flight jacket, saying: “I don’t know what happens when I miss him. I don’t know what to do.”

Poe pulled back, posting his hands on her shoulders and looking into her eyes. “Start with what’s in front of you. Then the next thing. Then the next. That’s how we earn our luck, by being brave, as many times as we can. Then we can save it up for something real. Until we run out of luck, or we get where we’re going. That’s the only way to survive this life.”

She nodded, took a deep breath, and pulled away, calling out over her shoulder as she headed back to her bunk to at least change clothes. “You said the villagers needed help?”

They did: there were a hundred or so villagers left, huddling in black cloaks, their purple knobbled skin bright under their pale blue moon. They had a mining installation up there, deep in the moon, that their chief,  a young woman with thickly braided rose-colored hair and a face of stone, was pretty sure the First Order had no idea existed. Most of the villagers had family up there, supplies to last them years, but only if their entire world wasn’t pulverized when the First Order returned. Their chief stood with her back to their mud-and-thatch-roofed huts, arms folded and eyes tight. She had a big request:

“Can you help us get to our families?” Rey looked at Poe, and he lowered his eyes, asking the chief:

“We want to, friend, but breaking from blue to black the five times this would take to get all of your people to safety would suck our fuel supplies dry —“

The chief barked a rough laugh, lines forming and easing in her face, breaking the illusion of granite and making her look so much younger: “Fuel we have — more than enough for your battered beauty. That’s what we’re mining up there.”

Poe looked at Rey and she sent a desperate message through the Force, hoping it might break through the ysalamiri using the same compassionate loophole their dreams came through and find Ben, wherever he was: _I’m coming, but I need to earn us some luck first_ she said, hoping he would understand and dreading he wouldn't.

Over the next twelve hours, they packed every inch of the Falcon full of people, from the toddlers in the smuggling compartments to teenagers in the gun room. Rey and Finn stayed on the planet for the first three runs, to help people pack, to help them close down their lives in a matter of hours.

It was dirty, thankless work. Rey hadn’t felt better in weeks. She was carrying a baby for an exhausted Mom with 3 under 3, letting the little one pat on her cheeks and neck and forehead, wriggling her nose as he dragged on her hair until it was in a straggled mess. When Poe and Chewie touched down, Poe saw her and just about died laughing — the little one had had some kind of green goo on his hands and, in the darkness of the night, Rey hadn’t noticed him spreading it all over her face.

Poe said she would be flying the next run and she strongly suspected it was so the Falcon’s security cameras could get permanent documentary evidence of her be-goo-ed face.

They had just broken to black when an older woman came tottering through the cockpit door, maneuvering through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, a wreath in one hand and a book in the other. The wreath was made of dark leaves with tiny, bright white flowers flowing around it and Rey glanced at her with a smile, making sure Chewie had the flight controls covered before turning to her:

“Can I help you with something? The ‘freshers are in the med bay.” The woman shook her head, looking around the cockpit before hanging the wreath on a bit of notched metal over the door. She nodded to Rey:  
  
“We celebrate the Chriss New Years in our village, but there will be no room for these on the mining installation. The black leaves are for the space between the stars, and the little white flowers are the stars themselves. We celebrate the Force that holds the stars apart, darkness and light, with star-gazing every New Years. Seeing the stars reminds us what we are are made of, no matter where we are.” Her voice musical and lilting, eyes kind. Rey remembered something about the New Years, but the Falcon jostled and it slipped from her mind.

“When is that again?” Rey asked.

The old woman shook her head, smiling:

“In two days time. Anyway, that’s not what I came for. My grandson found this behind a loose bulkhead,” she said, holding out the leather-bound book, “It is not in a language our people speak, so I expect it is a prior passenger’s.” 

For a heart-stopping moment, Rey flashed back to her memory, trying to remember if she’d forgotten to lock-up the Jedi texts she’d stolen from Ahch-To; but no, they were safely with General Organa and had been for months. The woman shook the book a bit to get Rey's attention back and Rey accepted gratefully it, turning over the brown, hand-tooled leather bound cover. It said:  _Tales as Old as Time_ and smelled of weathered paper and long-set ink.

Rey thanked her and watched her wander away, wrinkled hand snatching a tight grip on the robes of everyone she passed; on Jakuu, the woman would have been a world-class pick-pocket. Rey glanced at Chewie and seeing she was fine for a moment, flipped the book open open. The first page said:  
  
“Property of BOS.”

And her heart stuttered. Alarms blared and she slapped the book shut, tucking it safely under her leg, turning back to the console to help Chewie navigate past some incipient asteroids. 

On the way back for their last pick-up, the Falcon blessedly empty again for the moment, Rey pulled the book out and let it fall open to the place where the binding was softest.

It was a drawing, an illustration of a broad, swirling night sky with a dark silhouette looking out at it from over the edge of a parapet; but rather than just white dots, the stars were a menagerie of color, vibrant and perfect, highlighting the forested world below in gentle washes. She wondered if she plotted those exact stars into her star charts, what world she would find with that unique sky. On the facing page was a story in careful printed script. The title in black ink swooped and swirled much as the stars did: _Anima and Amor_. Chewie leaned over to see what she was doing and made a soft noise, running his finger down the page.

He told her to be careful with it, it was from Alderaan.

Rey stilled, hands gentling even further on the book. She opened the front cover slowly, saw now while the B and O were in one hand, the S was in another, the letter pressed harder in a darker ink and a less steady hand.

She closed the book and stood, looking around to find a safe place to put it, knowing that they would be cheek-to-jowl on this last run and not wanting to lose this precious thing now it had been found again. Chewie held out his hand and Rey passed it to him, watching him tuck it between his pelt and his bandolier. As they were touching down, Rey got a ping on the secure comm line, a single cold word: “Update?”

She hurried off the dispatch she should have sent the day before, trying not to think of how much might have changed since then, knowing she had three more hours of helping refugees before she could sleep again. Her dispatch to General Organa said: “He is getting worse. From the bruises and his reactions whatever pain they’re inflicting on him now is getting deeper, more physical, more _personal_. We have two planets more to search. I hope we get there in-time.”

—

The last flight to the moon was the fastest, the chief wisely having sent the most delicate and anxious people first, leaving only those with the startle responses of stones for the final, grim-eyed race to the moon. Rey preferred the crying babies and over-talking teenagers to these hard-eyed veterans, but she knew every outpost needed its protectors. Chewie and Poe fueled-up the Falcon from their mining reserves in record time, but Rey missed it all because she was in her bunk, smell of worried people still in the air, mixing with the wreathes which she'd found hung in every room, including the 'fresher, everywhere the grateful people could find hook in the Falcon. Their scent took her down, down, down.

She opened her eyes and found him, floating, deeper than she’d ever found him before, his face so, so pale. She pulled and he was so, so heavy. She was weaker, exhausted and keyed-up and terrified; but she pulled him up, got him to the surface, carried him onto the rocky shore, rocks dark under the new moon. She pressed her cheek to his, perhaps checking his breathing, perhaps grateful for the contact and — a breath. A heartbeat. _Thank the Maker_.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and though his eyes were bleary, his confusion was clear.

“I wasn’t here last night,” Rey said, voice heavy with guilt. He shook his head and groaned, hand reaching to feel the back of his head. She leaned over to look, fingers light, slipping between his to feel a broad bump rising along the base of his skull.

“I don’t think they intended me to sleep tonight,” he said, voice scratching and raw, eyes steady on hers. “You didn’t miss me, I haven’t slept since we last saw each other. They’re trying a new sleep-deprivation-spiced-up-by-beatings thing. I think to characterize this as ‘sleep’ might be generous; perhaps ‘knocked-out’ might be more accurate.”

She winced, glancing a question at him before he nodded. She pressed a bit of healing energy into the bruised skin and bone there, grateful to see no new evidence of hand-shaped bruises around his neck or back.

When she was done, he sighed in relief and settled back down. Then he tilted his head, moving now without pain, and raised his hand to her face, fingers light on her skin. “Why are you — did they do something to my eyes, or are you _green_?”

And Rey — she couldn’t stop herself. She collapsed on his chest, laughing and laughing, as she felt him freeze under her, his hands fluttering on her shoulders, and she felt the laughs starting deep in her belly, rolling up her body, and soon he was joining her, chuckling. She felt his stomach move with his laughter, felt his bare skin under her hands, and when she could breathe again, she found herself looking down his body, her cheek just below his rips. There was some hair in front of her nose, darker than the rest, and without thinking she followed the trail down to the waistband of his pants, which clearly outlined something — and she sat straight up, pulling her hands away like she was burned, caustic with herself for ogling someone going through what Ben was. His eyes were still bright and smiling when she looked at him. She pointed to his stomach, giggling a little again: there were streaks of green where she'd rubbed her face there. 

"Sorry," she said with a laugh, gesturing. “There was,” she said, a giggle bubbling up, before she swallowed it back down. “There was a planet, the First Order was shelling it, punishing people for helping the resistance.” She held up a hand, in case he wanted to argue the point, “And we were helping them evacuate. There was a little kid, his hands were kind of goopy, and it was dark, and I think he smeared it all over my face.”

“And did every fresher on the Falcon fail at once?” He asked, voice dry. She mock-glowered and tossed her hair back imperiously:

“No; I must have forgotten about it, in the rush.” Her voice was softer, wavering a little when she said: "I hated the thought of missing you, of not being here when --"

"But you didn't, so it's fine." He said, his voice soothing. He was still smiling and she ducked her head, scrubbing her face with the edge of her tunic. When she raised her face again, he was watching her, eyes steady. She pointed to her cheek and he nodded, before sitting up, slipping his thumb in his mouth, and wiping it along her jaw-bone.

“There you are.” He said. Her breathing was kicking up, her heart racing — it must be the cold. She leapt to her feet, striding to the pile of wood, dwindled down to perhaps only enough for a few more fires. He stood, a bit more stiffly, and watched as she set the fire. After a moment he said:

“I don’t know when they’ll wake me up again; so I need to say this now.” He knelt down beside her. His hands were loose in his lap, and for a moment, all Rey wanted to do was lean forward and kiss them, rest her head in his hand, feel his big, warm palm brushing her hair away from her face. She bit the edge of her tongue to focus herself and looked at him, nodding for him to continue. His eyes were on his hands, his voice hoarse when he said:

“I don’t know why you decided to save me and there is nothing I can do to thank you. I can tell you I will do everything I can to survive. There may be more nights when I cannot be here, but when I am here, I am sometimes one thing and sometimes another. It seems to be a part of the dream, dipping into different parts of my soul. But no matter how I am here, these nights, they are what I think of to escape the days: your stories, your brightness, your laugh. They will be coming and will take me away again. But until they do, tonight, I know I want to hold you, to know you’re here, no matter what happens in the waking world.”

She shivered in spite of the fire; she wondered if he’d rehearsed that, what made him feel he needed to thank her. “I’m going to save you because you don’t deserve what they’re doing to you, and because, Ben —“ and she reached out, picking up one of his hands and toying with his fingers, pads against pads, pointer fingers sliding across and along and between the lines and callouses of his palm; he had a universe in his hands. Her voice was a whisper: “Ben, I want to know you, in the waking world, when you are free to leave or find someone else — let me finish — to be whoever it is you’re going to be. Because I want that, more than anything, because you deserve to have a chance to do better, to get _better_.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment, hands tight on her back and said: “There was a time when I would have said there was nothing in me that needed to change. But there is a quiet here on this beach, a quiet in my soul, that I have never felt before. I don’t know if it comes from the moonlight, from the water, from the darkness in this cave — or if it’s just you.” She shivered and slid their fingers together, gripping him tightly, like if she could just hold on, they could stay here, he would be safe.

Finally, the fire was getting uncomfortably warm on her back, and Rey had to pull away. She glanced out the cave entrance to check their time, the new moon making the stars impossibly bright, outlined behind his form and — she smacked herself in the forehead.

“Wreath!” She shouted and Ben Solo startled so badly she reached out, hand around his arm to steady him. “Wreath.” She said, in a saner voice, as he scrunched his eyebrows in utter confusion. 

She took a breath: “There was this old woman, in the cockpit, she had a wreath — and she had your book — and _Tales as Old as Time_  and there were these stars and the Chriss, _the Chriss_ , Ben, the Chriss!” His eyes were wide, his hands going up, like she was star-mad. He spoke slowly, emphasizing his words to break through her revelation:

“What about the Chriss?”  
  
She was fumbling, the order of things mixing up in her mind, in her struggle to get it all out -- everything was coming together. She ticked-off her fingers: “We haven’t known where you are, so we can’t go and get you;” another finger, “you can’t tell us where you are, because they won’t tell you;” another, “but if you could get outside, you might be able to recognize some star charts, if I bring them next time, since we know you’re on one of two planets.”

She looked at him, willing him to understand. He said, voice patient: “But they’ll never let me go outside.”

“The wreaths, Ben, _the wreaths_!” She said, mind racing to the end of the story, “Day after tomorrow is the Chriss New Year and the guide we had on our last planet said it’s their policy to let any prisoner who asks see the stars on New Years. If you ask, they’ll have to let you out, have to let you see the stars; it’s a religious thing with them, it's their way of understanding of the Force.”  
  
He got it, eyes widening: “Then I can tell you where I am.”

She nodded hard, face shining with hope: “Then we can get you free.”


	7. Chapter 7

Rey's dispatch to the General took the cold, distant tone she felt her leader wanted for these things: “They are using sleep deprivation on him; the only rest he is getting is when they knock him out. He's experienced a lot of damage but still holds hope. We have a plan that I think will work; I am hoping it will be days before he is free (but did not tell him so in-case it doesn't work; I don't want to give him false hope).”

This time, she received a swift reply, acknowledging receipt and ending with: "Rey, in my experience of the world, there has never been anything false about hope."

After she sent the message, Rey spent the morning with Finn, calculating exactly what star charts she would have to memorize to allow Ben — disoriented, isolated, beaten, now sleep-deprived — to quickly tell the difference between the starscapes of Kambando and Nauticus. They used the time they usually met in dreams as guess for when nightfall would be, assuming even the most cruel guards hated the night shift. Then they looked at the two worlds, figuring out every version of the constellations that would be visible from any place in the darkness. It was long, mathematical work, but Finn was ready and Rey was focused. Poe was flying the Falcon to a point as equidistant between Kambando and Nauticus as they could manage, since both moved around the same star on the outer edges of the Chriss-controlled system.

Rey spent the afternoon memorizing those very constellations: the Razor’s Edge, the Fishhook Constellation, the Cloak’s Sweep, and something that no matter how she looked it at, never looked like a nerf, but was nonetheless called the Nerf Herder.

After she could draw the star charts by hand, blindfolded, she had hours to go before she slept. She did forms with her repaired lightsaber and then pulled Finn into sparring with her, her staff against his, knocking, sweeping, tossing, throwing, rolling and smacking for hours until he was pouring sweat and she could barely breathe, could barely stand. He called a stop and flopped down on the ground, letting the training robot roll away. She lowered herself to sit beside him.

“I want to ask you something, and I don’t know how to ask.” Finn said, eyes on the patched durasteel of the ceiling. Rey nodded:

“You want to know how I can hit you so hard when I’m like one half of you. It’s not because of the Force —“

“No, Rey; it’s about Kylo Ren.” 

She stilled, eyes drifting down to his; he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“In the dispatch, from yesterday, you said their abuse was getting more ‘personal.’ What does that mean?” 

And Rey felt a chill, starting in her wrists, shivering her shoulders, working its way down her spine to twist her gut. 

“I don’t know if he wants everyone to know the details of what he’s going through,” she started, voice even, remembering what things she’d never told anyone but Ben — just him, just in a dream. “We need to build sympathy for him, or at least a shared understanding that he’s been punished, if not for what he did on Crait or what he’s done for years, then for his other crimes. And maybe, if enough people believe he’s being punished, they won’t fight for the death penalty when he’s tried. And at least there’s no punishment-by-torture allowed in the resistance. But not everything that happens in that prison cell needs to be for public consumption.”

Finn rolled his head over to her, question still hard in his eyes: "I'm not 'public,' Rey. We'll be sharing air supplies, a 'fresher. What do I need to know?"

Rey nodded, her stomach warming at the way he'd framed it, that it wasn't about being a looky-loo at someone else's pain. “When he’s onboard, I wouldn’t touch him without asking,” she said and she saw it, not the full understanding that another survivor would have, but a sliver of it, enough to pull Finn up to a seated position, make him wrap his arms around his knees until his knuckles stood-out.

“Ok, I can do that.” He said. They sat in awkward silence for a while, and Rey mourned it, mourned even a minute’s loss of their tight friendship as he thought about what she might be saying. Then her Finn was back, clapping his hand on her shoulder and saying:

“We’ll get him soon, Rey.” She nodded, and stood, stretching her arms and then coughing at her smell.

“I’ve got a date with the ‘fresher, then I’m going to bed.”

He tossed her a lazy salute and stood to go and keep Poe company in the cockpit.

After a hot shower and hours of sparring, Rey settled into bed, feeling her exhaustion rising. She closed her eyes, her mind exercise-numb and quieter than it had been since Ben had flinched away from her in the cave two nights ago. The constellations she had studied were as clear as her memory of the pattern of moles on Ben’s face.

She rolled over and felt something hard under her pillow; she must have been too exhausted the night before to feel it. She pulled it out: it was _Tales as Old as Time_ , carefully wrapped in one of her thick scarves, with a scrap of paper hanging out from the story of Anima and Amor, written in Chewie’s broad hand: 

“Yours, for safe-keeping, until we get him back.”

—

She saw him and started swimming, shoving with her arms and legs, driving herself further and further down, because this time, he’d drifted out away from the cove, his cloak like a sail into the open current. She drove against the underwater river, feeling the temperature drop, feeling her lungs fill to bursting — she threw herself towards the surface, taking a massive gulp of air before pushing herself down, using the Force to speed her body through the water. He was so pale, so deathly still, as she wrapped her arms around him. She aligned herself with the Force, reaching out with her feelings for the bright life of the air, and _tugged_ , pulling herself up and through the water until they both came gasping to the surface. But they were far from the cove now, sweeping around the edge of the island, and she struck out, pulling him along in the water, until she found a low shelf of a beach, the shattered and sanded-down remains of a long-ago rockfall.

She pulled him ashore, her use of the Force sapping her, her strength failing fast. She lay there for a moment, him heavy on her arm, trying to push her core warmth into his body. After a long moment, he coughed, spluttering, wide eyes turning towards her as he kept coughing, kept bringing up seawater from his lungs, as she sat-up against a rounded stone and propped him between her legs, letting him rest his back against her front, her arms around his waist as he got his breath back. Without waiting for him to speak aloud, she passed a message into his mind:

_I have the starscapes —take them before they take you back_.

He nodded and leaned his head back onto her shoulder and she felt his mind shift, open enough for her to make the connection. His hair was tangled and dripping, the long line where their bodies joined no warmer than the sea they’d pulled themselves from, but in that moment, Rey wouldn’t have traded places with anyone, not when she could feel him breathe between her fingers, not when she could feel him striding along the light-drenched corridors of her mind.

She opened a door to a room that was without walls or shape; it was like standing inside a clear ship in the middle of the galactic tumble of stars. He stepped inside, his dark clothes making him for a moment like the sillhouette in his book, a man against the stars. She stepped-in behind in and closed the door. She gathered up the collections of stars he would need to memorize in her hands and tossed them to him. He started, eyes wide and caught them like he would a ball playing catch. Then he spread out his hands, growing and shrinking the stars, twisting them from this angle and that. 

She stepped up to him, hands on his, and gripped the edges of the galaxy between his fingers and _pulled_ _,_ arms wide, until they were standing together in the middle of a revolving star storm. She turned, giving him her back, and pointed out the Cloak's Sweep as it passed. He leaned down, chin hooked over her shoulder and breath warm on her cheek to look where she was pointing. He raised his arm alongside hers, the inside of his elbow hooking around the outside of hers, notched together like they were formed that way, while his other arm slipped around her waist to steady himself against her. Rey's stomach tucked and tumbled as she realized how painfully close his hips were to hers, but she slowed the stars down for him, moved to show him the Fishhook Constellation, tracing the stars in their passage, over and over, until they lay steady in his mind. Next, the Razor's Edge rose to their right and she showed him how it might slide between worlds depending on where he was on a continent. Finally, at the edge of the horizon of one Nauticus and true-north for Kambando, was the Nerf Herder. He groaned low and amused in her ear when she told him the name and wouldn't tell her why.

She started to step away, wanting to give him time to practice. But his grip on her tip tightened by a fraction and she held still, his body centimeters from hers. Together, they lowered their arms and she turned towards him, heat between their bodies building as she felt sweet things break in her stomach and belly, fusing with hot metal only to shatter again. She stepped forward, arms going around his chest, her face tucked into the bend of his neck and then his arms linked behind her tight, pressing them together like they might for a single breath hold the same space. They held that moment, timeless, poured from gold and sealed in amber. There is no real time inside the mind and that moment could have lasted eons, their bodies apart but their minds together, fused at the broken edges.

Then he huffed in her ear and she was about to ask him what was so funny when he doubled-over in front of her, hand on his stomach, sucking air  like he’d been kicked. He fell to his knees like he'd been struck across the back and she fell with him, hands on his arms, eyes locked with his as the stars froze. He forced the words out, pain sounding in every syllable:

“No, it’s not that — they’re taking me, they’re — ”

"Ben, we're coming — Ben, hold on —" she wanted to shout over the pain in his face but she whispered, tried to keep him here, keep him with her, away from them, away from whatever was happening in the waking world. His eyes were wide, seeing something rising behind her. 

He gasped  out one word: “Rey —“ 

And he was gone.

Rey was alone in her mind as her stars fell, clattering down around her shoulders like sprays of hard metal cut by a welder's torch, cooling before they touched ground.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This the first time we see some of what's happening to Ben first-hand, in real-time, rather than after-the-fact. Sometimes that can hit readers differently. If you have questions about it, or just want to join me in screaming about this ridiculous and wonderful ship, join me over on tumblr at jocarthage.
> 
> I love your comments and feedback, I seriously refresh this fic like 3 times an hour when I'm not busy (and sometimes I am) to see if there are more cool comments to respond to. #toomuchinformation #shrugemoji

Rey awoke with a start, rolling off the bunk and gasping, arms around her stomach. She hunched against the side of her bed, covered her face with her hands, and screamed, clenching her fists until her knuckles creaked; she screamed again. Poe came rocketing through the door, blaster out, like he was expecting Kylo Ren to be menacing towards her from out of the closet.

When Poe saw her alone on the floor, he holstered his weapon and dropped to his knees, patting her shoulder tentatively as her body was silently wracked with sobs.

“Finn!”  He yelled in a panic and her friend came roaring around the corner, dignity barely maintained with a hastily-wrapped sheet. She looked at Poe and now the weapon was out of sight, she realized he was shirtless, shoe-less, and his hair was distinctly mussed.

For some reason she couldn’t explain, the sight of them — anxious-eyed, tousle-haired, a blooming bouquet of what looked like fresh hickies on Poe’s throat -- snapped her sobs over to laughter. Her body shook with them and Finn knelt beside her, hand on her shoulder.

“Let it out, Rey, just let it out,” and she leaned into his warm shoulder, eyes squeezed so tight she hoped nothing could come out. Her body was wracked, arms covering her stomach as she eased back, wiping her eyes.

“Sorry, guys,” she said, and the two of them shared a worried glance.

“Come on,” Poe said. “Let’s get some water and food into you.”

Rey brightened at the prospect of food, rising. Poe led the way, but Rey had only walked a few steps when she raised her hand and stopped, both men turning to look at her:

“They grabbed him in his sleep. I don’t know what they’re doing right now.” She shook her head, hair trailing across her face. “I gave him the starcharts. If he can survive until tonight, we’ll know where he is.”

Poe nodded, face lined with concern — “And then we’ll go and get him. But that will be hours and hours from now and you need food, water, and rest. In that order.”

Rey nodded, stomach waking up, and moved over to the little eating area. Finn went back to their room to get some clothes on. Chewie was glaring at all of them from the console — if she remembered right, Poe was supposed to be his co-pilot this shift. Poe handed over some rations and a big bottle of water.

“Drink up,” he said and she obeyed as he sat down and settled himself with a piece of bread. When she set the bottle down, he looked at her seriously and said:

“The summer I turned 19, I was a lifeguard.” She looked at him blankly; was this some kind of code?

“A lifeguard,” he clarified, “is a beautiful man who sits on a tall tower on a beach filled with other beautiful people, informs them they should not go into the water deeper than they can swim." Rey felt the corner's of her mouth twitch and said:  


"I've never been to a beach in the daytime," and Poe looked at her strangely before continuing:

"A lifeguard is a man who carries a rescue can that floats and always has extra sunscreen in his pocket for the more muscular merchant princes’ sons — don’t tell Finn.” Rey made a key-locking motion with her fingers and tossed the invisible key over her shoulder.

Satisfied, Poe continued: “It was a good summer gig; bad pay, but as I said,” and he glanced up at Finn as the young man came back into the room, kissing him on the cheek before sitting down tight beside Rey, arm a comforting weight across her shoulders. Poe’s eyes were only for him when he said, voice low and slightly-dazed: “Sunscreen.” Then he shook his head, still mussed-up hair flopping into his face:

“I took a few days of ‘training’ to get ready for my difficult work as a lifeguard, and do you know what the only thing they drilled us on was, _really_ drilled us?” Rey shook her head, biting into her rations. They tasted like napkins and sadness, but they had calories. She smiled at Poe to continue and found his face serious now:

“How to knock people out with our rescue cans.” He lifted his piece of bread and began picking it apart, letting the crumbs get everywhere, “You see, most people, when they’re drowning, they’ll do anything to survive. They’ll push their rescuer under, just to get another breath of air.” He set his hands down on the table, crushing the growing pile of crumbs.

“Most lifeguards die not because of the waves or the creatures that thrive under them, but because when a living thing is hurt or scared or thinks he’s going to die, he will drown his rescuer to save himself.” He popped a piece of the bread in his mouth, made a face, and forced himself to swallow. “Just be ready to knock Kylo Ren out, if it comes to it.”

Rey frowned, grabbing the remains of his bread and eating it. “I’m ready to do what I have to.”

Finn squeezed her shoulder and she glanced at him; he smiled at her and then his eyes shifted to Poe like filings to a magnet. Poe clapped his hands and stood:

“Alright, time for bed. Finn?”  
  
And Finn stood, looking down at Rey to make sure she was ok. She nodded, still gathering crumbs and munching on them in small handfuls. She made a shoe-ing motion and the two men nearly sprinted back to their quarters, door smacking shut and _locked_ with an airy-hiss.

Rey smiled after them, before Ben’s face before he vanished filled her vision. She headed to the cockpit to keep Chewie company and to send her update to General Organa:  


"He knows the plan and has the information. They're catching him when he's sleeping and beating him. He's getting weaker, further away, but he'll keep fighting. He'll keep fighting until we get there."

—

Rey opened her eyes, the barest crescent of the moon gilding the underwater world where she found herself, its light so fine it only showed the edges of things, illuminating nothing of their substances. She looked around, straining her eyes and — there, a black shape, cloak tangled in the bones of the razorback leviathan. She kicked _hard_ and pushed herself towards his form. The moonlight caught the edges of things: his closed eyelashes, tiny bubbles trapped beneath them, shimmering in the cast-off light; the impossibly-tangled cloak, darker than the grey stone of the sea floor; his pale hand, outreached and straining for hers. She gripped his wrist, felt his answering squeeze, and envisioned his cloak _cut_ , him loosed and — he was. He was and he was pushing up to the surface _with_ her, arms strong, eyes open.

“I know where I am,” he said with his first gasp of breath. “Nauticus. I saw the night sky during their New Years bonfire, just like we planned, and it’s Nauticus.”

She got him to the beach, got the fire blazing and said: “I will be back here. But the sooner we can set-course —“

He nodded, hands held to the fire with a slight tremble but much firmer than they'd felt in weeks. “Yes.”

—

She woke and was stumbling towards her door before her eyes were fully open. Poe was in the cockpit and she gasped:  
  
“Nauticus.” His eyes widened and then he nodded sharply.  
  
“Copy.” And he turned to input the coordinates Finn had so carefully researched.

Rey turned to go before calling over her shoulder: “Need anything from me?” Poe flapped his hand at her.  
  
“Go back to bed, Rey. Tell him we’ll be there,” he checked his calculations, “tomorrow night, midnight. Tell him to be ready.”

—

Rey awoke under the surface and broke straight for air, feeling lighter than helium, lighter than light. She called out across the water:  _We are coming. We'll be there tomorrow at midnight_ as she swam towards the bright fire coming from the cave and the dark figure in front of it. He head snapped around, his eyes widening for a moment before he called-out:

“Do you need me to get you this time?”

She shook her head and kept heading for shore. The sickle of the moon was halfway across it course for the night and shone down, now seeming so much brighter than it had before. Ben waded into the shallows to take her arm and help her to shore and she grinned up at him, so happy she could crow -- _they were so close_.

“I’m going to get your clothes all wet again.”

He shrugged: “They’re not really what I’m wearing.” 

She looked at him quizzically and he gestured to her Jedi outfit: “Is that what you wore to bed?”

“No,” she said, looking down at the leggings and tunic, “But in dreams —“

Ben nodded, smiling back: “We look like how we think of ourselves.” He knelt beside the fire, gesturing for her to join him. She folded to her knees, leaving a space between their thighs. He glanced at her and then into the fire, mouth softening to a frown:

“I remember my mother told me once, before she abandoned me to Luke, that for years after she grew out her hair she would dream it was short, the way Breha Organa had kept it when she was a girl on Alderaan. The book you mentioned, it was her adopted father’s, hidden in the rooms he sometimes used at rebel headquarters.” Ben shook his head, his voice harsh: “Those things meant so much to my mother, sentimentality that tied her to the past. It was sentimentality that got her killed.”

Rey whipped her head around so fast her head hurt — “Leia’s dead?”

And Ben looked at her like she was the dumbest Loth-pigeon in flight school: “Yes, my squadron blew out the bridge — I’d tried to stop them, I refused to give the order, refused to take the shot, but General Hux,” and his name was like  _plague-ridden vermin_ in Ben’s mouth, “had my team do it without my knowledge.”

Rey was shaking her head, turning and rising on her knees so she could look Ben in the eye. She put both hands on his shoulders and gripped tight: “Ben, your mother is alive. I received a message from her two days ago asking for an update on you. It’s been her who’s been ensuring we have what we need to get the information on where you are, her that I’ve been sending updates to.” 

He was shaking under her hands, his eyes wide, hands holding hers tight to him. “But the bridge, I _felt_ her, I _saw_ it destroyed, nobody could have survived that —“

Rey shook her head, grinning wryly: “Your mother is not nobody. My friend who was there said she _was_ on the bridge, that it _was_ blown to smithereens, but that she kept herself alive, she used the Force to pull herself back through space to the ship. He’s the one who caught her in his arms, when she broke through the airlock doors; a fact that he’s made sure to mention about a dozen times. I'm so sorry I didn't tell you, I thought you had known — she must have closed herself off from you in the Force during the battle.” Rey was shaking her head, but Ben’s face was urgent, broken-looking:

“But she’s alive?” And Rey nodded, surprised when Ben collapsed against her, head hard into her shoulder, hair wet against her face.

“She’s alive,” he told her shoulder, voice soft, talking as if to himself but his arms still tight around her: “After the _Raddus_ ’s bridge blew, I was certain everything that tied me to the resistance was gone, everything that connected with my past was dead.” He pulled back: “I thought Chewie had let her _die_ , refusing to take a side now Han was gone. I thought the only ones left on Crait were the ones who hated me, the ones who had allowed my mother to _die_.” Rey shook her head.

“That sounds awful, but Leia’s not the only support you have in the resistance, Ben. Not then, and not now.” He shook his head, dismissive.

“I don’t really think of you as being ‘in the resistance.’”

She pulled away, looking at his cavelight dimmed eyes: “You should. The resistance is my home, my family. You killed people I cared about, on Crait. You killed many more who were friends of people I love. But in spite of that, in spite of everything else you had done, for the past two months, Chewbacca, Poe Dameron, and Finn have been hunting the galaxy to get you free.”

“They’re doing it for you,” Ben assured her and Rey scoffed, his eyes widening at the sound:

“I don’t know what hold you think I, or anyone else, could have on Chewie, Ben. But he has been piloting long hours, foregoing good contracts, holding-off on mourning Han properly on Kashyyyk because he wants _you_ back.” She closed her eyes, imagining the wookie. “He may want you back because he wants to howl at you until he looses his voice for all of the nerf-brained things you’ve done.” She opened them, to see Ben staring at her, mouth slightly open. "But he didn’t just let us use the Falcon, he _insisted_ on coming.”

Ben closed his eyes and shook his head. “Maybe so, but Poe Dameron can’t be there for me; and is Finn that former stormtrooper, the one from Jakku?”  
  
Rey nodded, fire dimming a little. “He’s the reason I got off Jakku and he’s probably the only one along for the ride because of me — or really, because of Poe, since Poe won’t let him out of his sight after the fool stunt he pulled on Crait. But Poe,” and Rey thought about it, not wanting to sugar-coat what Ben would be walking into. She thought about Poe's anger at Kylo Ren, his blaster at-the-ready last night, how the lines around his eyes had never really eased after Crait, and she decided that, for tonight, she would only tell part of the truth, quirking her mouth into a grin: “Poe promised me he would tell me stories of babysitting you.”

And it was worth it, saving the hardest damage for later, just to hear that surprised guffaw from Ben. The age and pain dropped from his face for a moment, and he looked closer to her age than Poe’s, saying: “He _wouldn’t_.”

Rey grinned, full-toothed and gleeful: “I think he would.” And Ben chuckled again, hands dropping from her shoulders as he turned towards the fire again. Their thighs were pressed tightly together.

Rey leaned towards him, shoulders rubbing together as he turned to look down at her, long, now mostly-dry hair brushing her cheek. Her voice was soft when she asked: “Is there anything you can tell us about where you’re being kept?”

He shook his head, hair trailing across his face. “They kept me blindfolded my entire way out. It’s not big — from the cell to the outside was 200 steps for me. No stairs, the air was breathable.” His voice lowered. “I couldn’t walk well — there hasn’t been a lot of food and it’s the first time they’ve let me out of my cell since I woke-up there two months ago. Everything that happens during waking hours, it happened in the cell.”

He leaned away from her, weight going onto an arm braced behind his back. “It was only for a minute, but Maker, it was good to breathe the fresh air, good to see the stars. Here, let me —“ and he reached over to grip her hand, squeezing tight, but nothing happened other than the tingles running up her arm that she tried desperately to ignore. It was like he was trying to open his mind to her, but —

She squeezed his hand back: “It’s the ysalamiri, they’re blocking your access to the Force. I saw them on Naka-Daka. It feels like being gut-punched and sat-on when it first hits you.” She traced her thumb over the back of his hand: “I can try, to see inside your mind, your memories of last night, to get your sense of the lay-out, the environment." He nodded, expression cautious:

“There are other things that happened that night, that you — that you might not want to experience.” Rey shook her head, resolve firm.

“The best chance we have of getting you out is if I know everything I can about where you’re being kept,” Rey said. “I don’t have perfect control, but I will try to only see what you want to show me.” He nodded, eyes glancing at the slowly lightening sky. “We’ll have to be quick.”

Rey nodded and extended her feelings, reaching outwards rather than inviting him in. She felt a stone wall, his natural resistance even without access to the Force. It was tall and arcing high, and when she looked-up in her mind’s eye, it rose tall and black above her head. The stone of the wall was glassy, reflective, and beneath her feet she felt a great heat, abated for now; banked lava. Not rambling corridors, not a library, but a obsidian castle on a lava-drowned planet, this was Ben's mental model? She remembered something she'd read in Luke's history books.

“Is this Mustafar?” She wondered. “Oh," she said, heart aching. "Oh, Ben.” 

She walked up to the glass-stone wall and pressed her hands against it. First the rock was hot, unyielding. Then, with what felt like the permission of the mind behind the castle walls, it cooled, softened, crumbling like a berm of sand, raised up by a high and consistent wind and knocked down the slope of a dune with the touch of a finger.

Inside was a pitch-dark corridor but there was no threat there for her, no feeling of fear, no doom echoed in the walls. Just a kind of loneliness, the sort you'd expect from a man who would build his inner mind into a forbidden castle that no one else could enter.

Her boots echoed in the full dark, her eyes unable to adjust to the utter abscense of light. Then — she was doubled over, on her knees, gasping, one hand fisted the ground, the other tight to her stomach. 

When she looked up, she was a Chriss prison cell, coughing like she was going throw-up as she struggled to breathe. Her hair was in her face, black, wild, and her shoulders were so broad she knew she’d have to turn sideways to get through the narrow door. Her aching body told her it was the end of a beating, not the beginning of one. This wasn't Ben as he'd been taken from her last night, it was what he'd seen in the minutes before midnight of the Chriss New Years.

She catalogued her surroundings, breathing hitched from a cracked rib stabbing into her side, as the guards brought in manacles: stone floor, stone walls, durasteel bars; guards in armor and face-masks; ysalamir in cages embedded in the corridor walls, growling low in their massive purple chests, pressed to the front of their cages with their tails switching back and forth hard enough to shake their bodies, big eyes meeting hers with something like understanding. It was nothing like what she'd seen on Naka-Daka.  The air was stale, tasting of raw sweat and fear. She tried not to dig too far into what Ben’s body was feeling, trying to respect what privacy of his she could, but the pain and hunger and fear were overpowering, drenching her in sweat. 

But when her fist came up from the ground, snapping the knee of the guard in front of her, it wasn’t her motion or her emotion that drove it — it was Ben’s. Even as the guard’s fist connected with the back of her head and the ysalmari howled, driving her face into the chipped stone and splitting the skin over her cheek, she felt Ben’s fire in her chest: molten and undimmed.

Then the black bag was over her head, her hands behind her back, wrenched up so far she could feel her shoulder blades ache under half-healed cut and slash marks. There was a deep pain in her legs and bare feet as she stood, but still, she fought them when they tried to drag her, forcing them to let her walk.

Walking let her count the paces — 213 at Ben’s much-longer stride, perhaps 300 of hers. Then a sense of the space opening up, the scent of fresh air and the sea. Rey wondered if it was her hold breaking, her consciousness coming back to the enclosing dream, on Ahch-To, to the dark cove, but she still smelled blood from her cheek, messily smeared across her face by the bag. She smelled fire, cooking meat, heard the clinking of bottles and the strumming of a stringed instrument: a New Years’ party. There was a tremendous BOOM and the smell of sulfur and then she gasped when the bag was ripped from her head, pupils contracting painfully as she found herself staring into the after-image of fireworks.

“You have one minute,” the guard said, his hand crushing-tight on Ben’s biceps. Ben nodded, tilting his head up, forcing himself to close his eyes. Rey was panicking in the renewed darkness: there wasn’t enough time for him to see the constellations. _Had he guessed at where he was? Why did he close his eyes on what would be their only chance?_ Then she felt his pupils relaxing, hearing the sounds, smelling the scents. A half minute went by and then Ben snapped his eyes open, scanning the horizon — there it was, the Fish Hook Constellation and there, the Nerf-Herder, just on the horizon, just where she'd shown him it would be. Nauticus!

His heart beat big and wild in her chest and his eyes kept scanning the sky, kept dragging in every detail they could. He was sucking in as much free air as he could even as his ribs cried out, elbowing the guard in the stomach and crouching down, looking now around the bonfire: maybe a dozen Chriss lounged around it, a few armed, some children. They must house the guards’ families near the prison. He looked back at the entrance, barely catching a hint of high, sharp mountains diving straight into the sea, the prison carved directly from the rock with an entrance that from the seaweed hanging above it -- it would be below the high-tide line. Rey yanked all of this information into herself, storing it where nothing could change it, as the bag went back over Ben’s head. 

She stayed with him as he was walked back down to the entrance to the prison, stayed with him as he was thrown into his cell, the guard locking the door behind himself. She stayed with him as the guard beat him, Ben protecting his head the best he could with his arms behind his back. When it was over, the guards released his hands before kicking him one last time and rushing to get to door closed. Ben pulled himself up onto his the mat on the floor and tried to arrange his battered body comfortably, without much success. He faced the wall, keeping his eyes open long enough to scratch a mark with his thumb on the chalky stone. She glanced up and saw 12 score of those marks: 60 days he’d been here. 

She stayed with him until he fell asleep. She was about to pull back when she felt his body crushed beneath cold, still water. His lungs were burning, but he hurt too much to struggle just yet, the cold compressing and soothing the aches in his muscles and numbing the sting of his cuts. He felt something under the need for oxygen, a bubble growing under his diaphragm; hope. He held his breath, hearing his heartbeat slow, slow, slow and then — a presence. He reached out, grabbing for her hand, sure of where she was, sure that she would grip him back.

He opened his eyes and through them, Rey saw herself as Ben Solo saw her: her hair streaming back from her face, her own brown eyes full of protective fire and determination, the slight light of the moon scattered across the surface of the waves like a star field behind her.

Rey snapped back to herself, still disoriented by that image of herself diving down to him, by the feeling of Ben’s conviction when he saw her that he would be saved. It was like being under the water again but finding she could breathe. She had moved while she was sharing his memories, her arms wrapping around him, her face buried in his shoulder, his arms warm and steady at her back. She loosened her grip, thinking of his broken rib.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I got what I needed, but I didn’t want to pry.” Ben shook his head slightly before pressing his cheek against the top of her head. 

“You’re just in-time. They’ll come for me in moments and there’s something I need to do.” She raised her head from his shoulder, eyes questioning, searching. The split on his cheek was gone, none of the blackening and bruises that she knew mottled his face outside of this dream. The firelight made his skin glow, the constellations of his freckles begging to be kissed, and his eyes — his eyes were dark drink, lit-up from the inside like starfighter engines.

He traced his fingers up her back to her neck, thumbs soft across her jawline as he held her face. 

“Just this once.” He said, "Please," and leaned in. 

Rey closed her eyes and the distance between their mouths. The feeling of his soft lips on hers made her stomach drop, her blood thrum in her wrists, rush in her ears, carrying the news under her skin, tingling and tapping in her gut and lower. She kissed him, digging her hands into his shoulders, pulling herself closer to him. He broke away, gasping for breath, and she pressed their foreheads together.

“Not just this once.” She whispered, voice catching as he nodded, a slight smile on his lips.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're nearly there everyone! One more long chapter and this arc is done. I am so grateful for everyone's comments and support, it has been a lot of fun these past few days sharing this story with you. I have the second arc plotted out and parts of it written, so I'll be able to start posting that on something like a regular schedule, though not the twice-a-day I was able to do with this piece. Here is an idea of what the cliff looks like, if you're curious: http://aquietcottagelife.tumblr.com/post/171486543358
> 
> Again, thank you for all of your wonderful comments and support. We've got some tough going after this chapter, but I promise it will be worth it.

With Ben’s memories of his surroundings, with a quick confirmation from Amid Arash back on the Chriss prison installation on Altum, Finn found their best guess for Ben's location and used an old mining survey's maps to find them safe place to land, on a beach on the other side of a ridge bordering the prison. The local population had been forced from their land by the Chriss before the fall of the Republic, so it would be deserted. Poe made good time so the Falcon would land an hour before midnight, then Rey, Finn, and Chewie would hike over the ridge, break-in through the door Ben had shown her, get him out, and get gone. Poe would keep the Falcon ready.

“Do you have anything darker?” Rey asked as she rummaged through Finn’s few clothes for something dark enough to wear. She liked her Jedi robes in their light greys and whites, but she needed to be unseen, to avoid engaging the guards and hurting anyone who didn't deserve it.

“There’s got to be something black around here somewhere,” Finn said, stepping over piles of clothes to poke his head into the cockpit to ask Chewie. He came back into his and Poe’s room with a very strange look on his face.

“Chewie says he kept Kylo Ren’s clothes.”

Rey was pulling her hair back up into her buns, the last shirt she’d tried-on having knocked it askew. 

“I didn’t think you spoke Shyriiwook,” she said and Finn shook his head.

“Still don’t, but Poe translated. Would that be weird, wearing his clothes?”  
  
Rey shook her head, frowning: “I don’t see why. Clothes are clothes. Where are they?”

Deep in the bowels of the Falcon, behind a false wall covering a _second_ false wall, they found it. A small wooden chest of children’s clothes, hand carved with thick iron bands holding it together and decades of scuff marks around the sides. The clothes started-off tiny, for a baby, with carefully sewn-in initials on the back: BOS. The chest rocked as they unpacked it, Rey setting aside each item in a careful stack. They started off fine and silky and got more practical, with well-worn-in elbows and reinforced knees necessary for an active kiddo. Lower down, there were tunics, pants — still too small even for Rey. The colors got darker as she got deeper into the chest, the fabrics rougher. Finally she found a shirt in Finn’s size and another in hers; or, at least, it would be close enough with a firm belting. She’d pair it with her grey leggings and boots.

Near the bottom of the trunk she found a silk scarf, some kind of flowering scent still on it. She didn’t recognize it, but set it aside carefully nonetheless. She and Finn repacked the chest and he’d nearly closed the lid when Rey shot out her hand to stop him:

“Look,” she said. There, hand-carved on the inner lid of the chest, right by shiny durasteel hinges, where the words: _From Han Solo, to Ben Organa Solo, on ABY 5._ Rey looked at it again, seeing how different the hinges were from the rest of it, and said:

“I think this was his cradle.”

Finn grimaced and stepped back: “That his father, who he killed, kept for all of these years, tucked away where no one would find it. God, Rey, this family is so fucked-up. It makes me wonder if we missed-out on anything.”

Rey shared an orphan's smile: “You seem to be making quite a nice family with Poe. Should I expect wedding invitations soon? Will I be in the wedding party?” She teased, nudging him with her elbow as they lifted the first and then the second false wall into place.

Finn shrugged, nose pinking in embarrassment and deflected: “Have you thought about what we’re going to do after this?”

Rey shook her head. She’d been going from crisis to crisis for so long, she had no idea what a ‘next’ might look like.

Finn slung his arm around her waist and she leaned her head into his shoulder: “I vote we go to the beach. Poe has some kind of thing about sunscreen, I don’t know what it is, uh, but it seems worth it trying to explore explore and uh — and who doesn’t like the beach? Someplace warm, someplace quiet.” He shot her a look. “And if Ren needs some quiet time, getting him that will be a lot easier someplace outside of the conflict than at a resistance base. I’m sure the General would understand, give us a month or two to work our way back home.”

Rey stopped in the under-deck hallway, turning to him, face unsure: “I don’t know if Chewie would let us keep the Falcon out of commission for so long — there’s a specific mourning ritual that he said he’d promised Han he’d perform on Kashyyyk.”

Finn shrugged, looking at her fondly. “We can get by without Chewie for a few months. Don’t get me wrong, I love his completely-unintelligible company, but maybe that’s the break we all need. He drops us off someplace, we make with the sunscreen and the suntan and the, you know, healing from a major trauma; Chewie does the ritual back home; picks us up, brings us to headquarters and Ren faces justice from there.”

The ship jerked under them and they scrambled for the ladder: “Feels like we hit atmo,” Rey said, Finn hustling up after her. 

They strapped in for the descent, which Poe took at speeds and angles that left Chewie howling with concern for his ship; but a bare minutes later, they were coming from behind a mountain, lights off, before alighting on a deserted stony beach with the waves crashing less than a meter from the Falcon’s rear landing strut.

“Did you check the timing of the tides?” Rey yelled to Finn as theyran down the ramp before the engines had wound down.

“What?” He yelled, cupping his ears.  Chewie came up behind them and shoved them forward with a growl, telling them to stop giving away their position and get to cover. 

They did, Rey eying the seaweed hanging high on the cliff’s edge, above the top of the Falcon. She ran towards it with her hand on her lightsaber and Finn’s map of the terrain firm in her mind: up the slate-grey cliff dividing this beach from the one she’d seen in Ben’s mind; rappel down the other side; break through the door; sneak through the prison — if necessary, fighting the guards, and oh, she’d like to take a piece out of the guard who’d split her cheek open on the concrete -- and she took a breath. She would take no life unless she was attacked first. Finn was right: they wouldn't get anywhere by killing what they hated, no matter how many times she'd envisioned separating the guards' who hurt Ben's skin from their bones. She re-focused, trying to brace herself for what would happen when her connection to the Force was severed, but she could barely remember the intensity of the loss from Naka-Daka; she would just have to wing it.

Chewie took one look at the near-sheer cliff face, grabbed Rey’s paracord, slung his bowcaster around to his back, and began to freebase the entire 50 meter edifice. Rey and Finn were still looking at each other when they heard him hoot down to them and a rock with one end of the paracord attached to clattered to the stone between them. Rey tugged on the cord, found it solid, attached her winch, and began to work her way up. 

Once she was at the top, she found her anchor was a massive bounder they could probably tie a rancor to without an issue. She waved Finn up as Chewie worked his way down the other side, a gentler slope. Checking on Finn every few minutes, Rey turned and surveyed the prison.

There were bright lights in a ring around the oval entrance and all of the rocks for a 10 meter radius around the entrance to the beach had been roughly cleared. There are no posted guards she could see, but she kept low behind the boulder nonetheless.

Finally, Finn made it up, huffing and puffing. Rey pulled up the cord and lowered it down the other side. She leaned in close to Finn, speaking so even the most sensitive area mics couldn’t catch her voice above the sound of the waves.

“I don’t see any guards, but that means there must be cameras. Let’s make this too quick for them to muster a response.” He nodded and she was about to start her way down the opposite side when Finn’s comm squawked and he slapped at it frantically, Poe’s voice coming through loud and clear:  
  
“How’s it going, team? The water’s getting a bit high, do you have an eta?”

Finn crushed the comm to his mouth and said in a harsh whisper: “We’re going on radio silence, eta is 45 minutes. Copy.” And hit the mute button. He ducked his head and Rey patted him on the shoulder.

“I only remembered to turn mine off because I was lounging up here, waiting for your slowpoke self.”

Finn grumbled: “Just because I didn’t grow-up on a jungle planet or use-up my childhood scavenging star destroyers doesn’t mean I’m not fit.”  Rey grinned before grabbing her winch and beginning to descend.

Chewie steadied her as she released her winch and attached it to the back of the belt she’d put around Ben’s shirt, hooking it to the spare she hoped to have in Ben’s hands in minutes. A boulder as big as a shuttle blocked them from view of the large reinforced metal entrance. Chewie told her he’d seen a guard step outside after Poe’s radio call, scan around with what looked like low-tech binoculars, and step back inside. Chewie thought the guard hadn’t seen them.

Finn joined them, the gentler slope easier on his arms, his face set and serious as he tied the paracord to a large rock to remind them where to find it.

Once he caught his breath, he asked: “What are we waiting for?” Chewie gestured for him to give the signal. Glancing at Rey and Chewie, he moved his hand down in a hard chop and they all 3 ran towards the door, Chewie looking for hidden guards or autocannons, Rey focusing all her energy on the entrance. She saw it shake, shiver on its bored-in bolts, deep cracks appearing in the rock around it as it shook itself free, when the affect of the ysalamiri hit her like a blasterbolt, making her stagger as they hit the circle of light, lose her pace, breath tight in her chest. Finn yelled, gun up and eyes scanning:  
  
“Are you hit?”

And she shook her head, stumbling to her feet: “I’m cutoff from the Force.”

Finn grinned, a harsh, battle grin shed never seen on his kind face. “I guess we’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.” He said, raising his blaster and atomizing the hinges and the rock wall behind them. They took-up positions on either side of the door.

Rey glanced between her friends and ignited her lightsaber.

“Let’s do this.” She said and turned to face whatever was coming down the hallway.

It was empty. 

She stepped through the stone archway into what must have been the administrative offices during the daytime, but there were no alarms blaring, no sounds of guards’ bootsteps to greet them. The sound of the sea behind her faded as she went further into the mountain. 

The only sounds were her her footsteps, the tap of Finn’s boots, and the pads of Chewie’s feet on empty corridors; their steps, and the sound of old water dripping down the walls. They came to an intersection and Rey picked a direction, on intuition or something better, she wasn’t sure; she still couldn't feel anything, couldn't guess if Ben was even here.

They reached a gate, thick bars between them and what looked like a row of cells. Finn’s hand on her shoulder, Rey sliced through the bars with her lightsaber, the smell of burning metal filling the air and making Chewie cough.

All of the cells were empty, though they wreaked of unchanged sheets and flop-sweat. In the middle of the hallway, Rey heard a sound and headed for it at a run — shouting, the clanging open of a prison door.

She rounded the corner to blinding light and dove back around it as blasters singed the stone where she'd stood, shoving Finn and Chewie back behind her.

“I saw him,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper and fingers cramping-tight on her lightsaber. A few more blaster bolts smashed into the opposite wall before the firing died out. Rey continued: “It’s bad. It looks like every guard in the place is around his cell, all armed with blasters. She took a breath, trying to steady herself:

"They knew we were coming for him.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it everyone! The end of the first arc. This is a nice, long chapter to give us some closure and to get everything ready for the second arc. I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much as I did writing it. There's some very satisfying stuff here, but maybe not in the way you're thinking. We'll get there too, I promise.
> 
> Trigger warnings are going to be important here -- we see what's been done to Ben and it could be upsetting.

"They knew we were coming for him.”

“You should leave!” Shouted an unfamiliar voice from around the corner, coming from where she’d glimpsed Ben, kneeling and gaunt in his cell with one of the guards standing over him. She heard a grunt of pain and forced herself not to look, not even as it was repeated, the dull sound of flesh hitting flesh echoing too loud on the stone of the prison corridor. Behind it, under it, all around Rey was a sound she'd never heard before, a low moaning growl. Something rammed the wall behind her and she jumped away, realizing it hadn't been a wall but grate door of a cage set into the stone, too small for the scarred and growling ysalamir inside. She crouched down to its level: its cage had none of the plants or ample food she’d seen on Naka-Daka. The lizard's big eyes took her in before turning towards the sound of Ben being kicked, its big head weaving back and forth with worry, its near-intelligent eyes flinching at each blow.

“I wish I could free you too, big guy,” she whispered, before looking up at her friends who were keeping a careful distance from the ysalamir. “I’m going to try to talk to them.”

Chewie looked dubious and before Finn could stop her, Rey extinguished her lightsaber and stepped into the light.

It was Ben’s eyes she saw first, brown and furious and desperate. His face was swollen, his split cheek still untended, his mouthed gagged with a dirty grey rag. He was kneeling, manacles stretching his arms tight behind his back. He wore rags that barely covered the thickets of cuts among vast ranges of bruises and welts on his skin and she wanted to count them and flay them into the skin of every guard in this place, slice for slice, hurt for hurt. He was so much thinner than he’d been in their shared dreams, ribcage pressing stark against his pale skin. The guard in his cell had his gloved hand fisted in Ben’s thick hair, holding him at an unbalanced angle that made him easier to kick. The guard had a blaster in his other hand, pointed at Ben's throat. Rey took a breath, holding Ben’s eyes with a promise like a wildfire, raised her voice, and lied:

“I don’t want to hurt any of you. I am here for Ben Solo.” Her voice was deliberate, stones dropped into deep water, building a staircase to the light.

“You can't save him!” Screamed the guard in the cell, shaking Ben like an unwanted puppy. A dozen Chriss guards stood between them with their backs to the bars, weapons out and ready.

Rey shook her head and stepped forward, her lightsaber held causally at her side. The other guards’ weapons came up, pointing solidly at her chest.

“You don’t need to do this,” she said in an even voice, eyes never leaving Ben's. “Say I took him by force. I am the last Jedi; anyone would believe you.”

The guard in the locked cell shook his head, a sneer twisting the thick blue skin of his face: “We knew you were coming; we’ve known since Naka-Daka. You thought any Chriss would betray us, for what, a slot on the First Order’s execution list?” He spat, violet saliva hitting the wall above Ben's sleeping mat and sliding down the scratched-out calendar. She forced her eyes back to Ben’s.

Her voice was low now, nearly pleading. “Let me speak to him, please.”

The guards in front of the cell were wavering before her slow approach, her quiet voice. The ysalamiri were watching her, their growls following her as they paced alongside her in their cages, their eyes on Ben. An older Chriss, dark green hair with streaks of purple falling across his cerulean face, called out to the guard in the cell, his voice a harsh whisper:

“Captain Jerush, she’s just a girl. I know I’m new here but she says she’s a Jedi and weren’t they — weren’t they the good guys?”

Captain Jerush began to stutter a response: "Sergeant Barda — "

But Sergeant Barda raised his free hand and Rey paused as Captain Jerush stop talking, both listening as he continued: “Look, I know this Kylo Ren character is a Bad Guy with a capital B and G, and I had no problem keeping him here; one less bad guy out in the galaxy and all. And he’s nuts, if like you told us during orientation yesterday, he’s been throwing himself into walls, getting all those scrapes and cuts and such. But if she just wants to talk; I mean, it’s the New Year, shouldn’t we let her?”

The other guards around him were starting to agree, their blasters dipping to their sides. The ysalamiri's growling softened, lowering to near-purrs. Captain Jerush's grip in Ben’s hair was still firm, his finger inside the trigger guard.

“No! Shoot her Sergeant Barda, that’s a command!” An ysalamir screamed as one of the younger guards raised his blaster, but Sergeant Barda pressed the other Chriss's arm down as he looked backwards into the cell, a worried line forming on his forehead.

“How did you say he got those scrapes again?”  
  
“He did them to himself,” Captain Jerush hissed. “He’s a Sith bastard who got what he deserved.”

The ysalamiri's growling was a rising buzz now, soft dry scraping of their bellies insistent on the stone floor. Sergeant Barda leaned closer, seeing the words on Ben’s back. His face greyed and when he next spoke, his voice had a rumble of revulsion.

“He wrote ‘Sith Lord’ on his own back? I’ve seen some cantina tricks in my time, but that would take the cake. What’s been going on here?”  
  
The other guards were shuffling their feet, looking between Sergeant Barda and their captain. Rey started walking towards them again. 5 meters away. Now 3. She was in touching distance of the nearest guard, and they’d barely noticed. They were staring at Captain Jerush.

Rey knelt among them and spoke, voice soft so as not to startle them, hand stretching through the bars. “I just want to speak with him, please.”

“Captain Jerush,” said Sergeant Barda, “That is a reasonable request from what looks like an unreasonable situation. Do you need help removing his gag?”  
  
The Captain screamed: “How  _dare_  you -- I outrank you. Men, arrest him!”

Sergeant Barda glanced at the others, who made no move to obey. The Captain was shaking with rage and Rey was so close, her hand bare centimeters from Ben’s shoulder, eyes locked.

Sergeant Barda looked down at her, then at the Captain, then at her again. He sucked air through his teeth and unhooked a big ring of keys from his belt. “ _I_ heard the Captain say he wanted the prisoner ungagged, did everyone else hear that?”

There was a general affirmative nodding and he unlocked the cell. Rey’s eyes never left Ben’s, hand still outstretched as she whispered: “Hold on.”

Moving incredibly slowly, Sergeant Barda stepped toward the Captain, slipping his hand around his blaster’s muzzle and moving it away from Ben Solo’s throat. Then he tugged it out of the Captain’s hand. Sergeant Barda knelt beside Ben, hands gentle behind his neck as he looked for the knot of the gag, Captain Jerush's hand still knotted in Ben's black hair, baring his throat. Sergeant Barda got the gag's knot free and used it to wipe some of the saliva from around Ben’s mouth, Ben breaking eye-contact with Rey to nod to him briefly. 

Still kneeling beside Ben, Sergeant Barda stared up at Captain Jerush, glaring until the man released his hold on Ben’s hair. Ben sagged briefly, rolling his neck before sitting up on his heels and looking at the Sergeant. Rey held her breath, hand outstreatched.

Sergeant Barda looked Ben in the eye and said: “Son, we haven’t met before since I just got-in from Naka-Daka yesterday, but I’ve been a Chriss guard my entire life. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen prisoners in conditions like yours, in all my time. Abusing those we’re charged with is just not the Chriss way; not in any prison I work in. So I need you to tell me, truly, did you do this to yourself?”

Ben shook his head, trying to speak, then had to clear his throat. His voice was a cracked whisper, more hoarse than anything Rey had heard in the dreams and her stomach was a twist of pain and hope to hear his real voice for the first time in months. He replied: “No.”

Sergeant Barda nodded, expecting that answer. “Who did it?” Ben looked up at Captain Jerush significantly, before flicking his eyes back to Sergeant Barda, saying: “They didn’t make a point of introducing themselves, but nearly every guard on this block must have heard what was happening. The only objections I ever heard were from the ysalamiri.”

Sergeant Barda froze, the displeasure of the great lizards rising again, and looked at the assembled men, none of whom would meet his eyes. “Is that so?”

There were no affirmative nods this time. Just hidden faces.

Sergeant Barda stood, blaster casually pointing at Captain Jerush’s stomach as the man took a step back. “Captain Jerush,” he said in a clear voice. “I was sent here after my supervisors received a tip from the diplomatic corps that there was something fishy going on here. I was empowered to officially relieve you of duty if I saw evidence of wrong-doing. I sure as  _banthashit_  have. Until there has been an examination of the security tapes to see who has violated this prisoner’s rights, you are relieved of command. In accordance with Chriss law and custom, the prisoner will be offered the option of house arrest while the investigation is on-going.”

Sergeant Barda looked to Rey, who was still kneeling on the stone floor, hand straining towards Ben. “Madam Jedi,” he said and she met his kind eyes.    
She let her hand drop and stood, guards moving out of her way as she stepped to the cell door.   
“Where does this prisoner live?”  
  
Captain Jerush spluttered from the corner: “His own people gave him up, sent him here. He has no home!”  
  
Rey’s glance could have killed a rancor where it charged, before she found Ben’s eyes again and told him:

“He lives with me, Sergeant Barda. I will take custody of the prisoner.”

The Sergeant nodded and leaned over to undo Ben’s manacles — Captain Jerush screamed and dove for the Sergeant’s blaster as every ysalamiri howled with rage — Rey’s lightsaber met him before he took more than a single step, blade cutting him clean in half.

The two halves fell on either side of Ben. He braced himself and stood beside her; looked at the dead man’s face.

He twisted his mouth for a moment and spit right between his startled, vacant eyes.

Rey holstered her lightsaber and slowly held her hands up, aware that every blaster in the block, with the exception of Sergeant Barda’s, was pointed at her.

Rey shifted her weight so she was between the guards and Ben as much as she could manage. She directed her words at Sergeant Barda but projected so the assembled men could hear her:   
  
“Captain Jerush had demonstrated his capacity for violence and I didn’t wish him to silence a survivor of his abuse.” She said in the most measured voice she could. “I did not intend to overstep my bounds.”

Sergeant Barda nodded, eyes considering, before gesturing to the other guards to lower their weapons. He reached over to undo Ben's manacles. They released with a clank and before they hit the floor Rey was in Ben’s arms, face buried in his chest, his hair tickling her ear.  _Alive and here, alive and here_ was the sound of his heart in his chest and all the words her mind could give her. He was warm and smelled like she'd expected but when he breathed against her it was like every hope she'd held lit-up like fireflies in her belly, circling and winding and  _free_.

“I’ve got you,” she whispered and he replied, too low for anyone except perhaps Sergeant Barda to hear:  
  
“I know.”

The sound of the guards moving restlessly outside the cell brought them back and Rey stepped away, her arm going around Ben’s waist as he sagged gratefully against her. She held him up and he winced as the rough material of his shirt brushed the scrapes on his back. Rey nodded to the Sergeant and turned to the door, kicking Captain Jerush’s legs out of their way so they sprawled across the cell floor behind them.

She began the long, slow walk down the corridor, Ben’s bare feet soft on the cold stone, steps pained, his breathing ragged. There was a part of Rey that could hear the moaning-purr of the ysalamiri as their big eyes followed them out, could mark which guards moved and which had to be moved, was counting the steps back to Finn and Chewy. But most of her was alive in the living skin between her and Ben, the impossible proof that he was _here_ and  _alive_. She refocused when Ben stumbled and swayed against her, face twisting in pain as he struggled to breathe around his broken rib; but he forced his head back up and every step he got away from the cell, every meter further from the blasters of the guards, the stronger he seemed. 

“I’ll have some paperwork you need to fill out,” Sergeant Barda called out to them when they were nearly at the corner. Rey paused, calling over her shoulder:

“Can you send it to Amid Aresh? He’s a Chriss prison worker on Altum. He knows how to get in touch with us.”

“I’ll do that,” Sergeant Barda said. And they were around the corner.

—

Ben’s eyes grew wide when he saw Chewie, Rey feeling his breathing catch, grow harsher. The wookie made a rough, rolling groan of empathy and reached out a big hand to grip Ben’s forearm before releasing it and gesturing that they should go back the way they came. When Rey glanced over at him, Finn's eyes were huge, roving from Ben’s brutalized face, to his rips stark against his bruise-mottled skin, to cataclysm of cuts across his shoulders and back. Rey tightened her arm around Ben's waist and he leaned into her, fingers plucking at the fabric of her black shirt, keeping them moving away from his cage and towards the distant sound of waves. Chewie took the lead with Finn covering their backs. But then Rey stopped.

“I have to do something,” she said, and moved out from under Ben’s arm, handing him to Chewie who took his weight with no issue. “I’ll just be a sec.”

Ben’s eyes were wide, questioning, as she ran back around the corner. All of the other guards had cleared out, and it was only Sergeant Barda left, staring at the body of his Captain on the cell floor.

“Sergeant Barda,” Rey said when she reached the entrance of the cell, voice hard.

The man looked up. “Madam Jedi, how can I help you?”

Rey stepped into the cell and his personal space, voice red with the fire she'd kept locked away these many months. She let it whip free, stinging the man: “I wanted Ben Solo free, so I did not demand justice from Captain Jerush; we would have left without harming him if he would have done the same.”  


Sergeant Barda began to speak and Rey spoke over the magmic sound of blood in her ears, voice still a harsh whisper. “But I want to make sure you know happened here. Ben Solo has been your captive for 60 days,” she said, pointing to the hash marks on the wall. “In that time, he has been tortured, beaten, burned, starved, raped, sleep-deprived, beaten again, brutalized, humiliated, and nearly killed. As you know, I have ways of finding out what is happening, here or any other places the men who did this to him might squirm. If I have not heard, within the next month, that _every single bastard who laid a finger on Ben Solo is dead or wishes he was_ , I will return and you will see a side of me you will not like.”

Sergeant Barda’s face was stony, and Rey stepped in so close she could smell the smoky New Year’s meat on his breath: “Do I make myself clear?”

He nodded, movement quick and jerky, face a paler blue than it had been even when he had seen what had been carved into Ben back.

Rey stepped back, turning on her heel and igniting her lightsaber. As she walked down the hallway, she dragged it, cutting gaping holes in the grates of every single ysalamir cage, smiling as she heard their large bodies move, a soft-slip of scales against stone as they waddled behind her down the hallway.

The others had kept moving, as she knew they would, and she caught-up with them near the administrative offices, the susurration of a dozen dry reptilian bellies gliding across the ground a counterpoint to the war drums in her heart. She nodded to Finn as she caught up, tapping Chewie on the shoulder for him to pause. Ben’s eyes were pained and concerned and his breathing hitching with each step when he saw her, but he didn’t ask any questions, slipping his arm over her shoulder as Chewie released his hold. He tucked himself close against her, dark hair mixing with hers. They kept moving, nearly to the final corridor when he leaned his head down, lips brushing her ear as they shuffled forward:

“Are you wearing my shirt?”  
  
And she stifled a giggle, nodding and hearing the small smile in his voice. _Alive and here. Alive and here._

They making it to the last corridor when something smelled wrong.

Chewie picked up his feet, and asked why was the floor wet when a waist-high wave crashed through the broken door.

“The tides!” Ben and Rey said at the same time, looking at each other, as Finn said, “What?” before Chewie was shoving them all out the door, into the waves and back towards the Falcon.

The tide had risen in the hour they had been inside right as it began lashing rain — the moon it was tied too must have an extremely fast, narrow orbit — so that they were thigh deep in crashing water by time they reached the outside. The ysalamir had scampered into the water and swum down the coast away from the beach where they’d parked the Falcon, and with them left the oppressive barrier between Rey and the Force. Ben felt it too, sucking in a huge breath and straightening with it, holding more of his own weight, keeping ahold of Rey for balance, but now able to stand on his own against the waves. She didn't have a moment to savor how to world shot back into color, how she could hear the dull roar of the universe around her, because she was trying to stagger up out of the ocean to the rain-whipped rocks to where they'd tied-off their paracord. Huddled together, Finn flicked his comms back on and heard Poe yelling:

“It’s been an hour, do you hear me? What’s happening down there? Come in!”  
  
Rey clicked her comm on and glanced at Ben before saying, a vicious, victorious grin heating her face: “We’ve got him, Poe. Tell the General we’ve got him.”

“Maker it’s good to hear you, Rey, but we’re going to have to wait on that. The tide rose like a monster about 10 minutes after you left. I had to find another perch a few kilometers down the beach. Don’t come to me, just let me know when you’re back where I dropped you off and I’ll come to you. You should be able to swim out.”

Rey’s face grew pale under the rain but Finn just nodded and found the cord and began working his way up the cliff, Chewie freebasing beside him in the rain. Ben and Rey stood alone together, waiting for their turns with the paracord. Ben was standing stronger but still shivering cold; Rey held onto him tighter. He looked at the paracord and then at his bruised hands.

“Here,” Rey said, pulling out her spare winch from her belt. He smiled his thanks. Rey’s mind was singing with the feel of him safe beside her,  _alive and here_ , when something occurred to her.

“The beach where we left the Falcon was lower than this one.” She said, eyes worried. Ben shrugged:

“Like Dameron said, he can hover and we’ll swim out.”  
  
Rey turned to him, hoping the darkness of the storm clouds hid her pinking cheeks, saying: “I don’t know how to swim.”

His face was a mask of incredulity under the cuts and bruises. “But every night —“

“I can do a lot of things in dreams I can’t do in the waking world,” she said defensively. Ben tightened his arm around her waist, slick with a mix of rain and sea water, and chuckled, eyes dancing.

“It looks like I might need to save you this time.”

She shook her head: “Let’s hope not, I don’t like the look of these seas.”

Ben stretched his arms out on either side before flexing them behind his head, shoulders popping as the rain dripped down his front. He tipped his head back, the rain rinsing off some of the dried blood and leaving his skin a stark white canvas with dark slashes across it and a scattering of moles she wanted to trace with her fingertips. He said smugly: “I can reach the Force for the first time in 2 months. If I didn’t think I would pass out before we landed, I would just fly us there.”

She batted at his chest and he looked down, confused: “Don’t get cocky. I’ve got a lot of healing to do on you before you do anything more than sleep, eat, drink, and sleep some more.” He nodded, eyes growing serious.

“I’m grateful for the help,” he said, voice low and rough again, and she flapped her hands at his chest again until he grinned.

“None of that. Look, Finn’s at the top. It’s your turn.”

He gestured for her to go ahead of him. “Ladies first.”

She shook her head. “If you’d heard what I threatened Sergeant Barda with, you’d know I’m no lady. Get gone, Ben.”

He did, climbing up the slope with sure, steady movements, using and probably over-using his connection to the Force. She wondered if he could fly, if he was all the way healed. She wondered if she could fly with him.

The water was higher now, yanking at her heels, the paracord's knot long gone beneath the waves. She cut the cord and began her climb. A crack of thunder slapped across the waves and she stumbled, slicing her knee open on a rock before staggering up again and keeping going. She met Finn on the ridge, Chewie nearly all the way down and swimming out to where the Falcon was hovering, ramp clipping the top of each long wave that rolled in a little higher than the last. She tossed the paracord over the edge, where it fell into the water — it must already be 3 meters feet deep down there already, and that was 15 meters from where the Falcon hung dripping above the waves like a seabird on a hard storm wind. She gulped in a breath.

Finn leaned into her, glancing at Ben before saying: “Solo here says that you don’t know how to swim. Are you still sure you want to head to the beach after this?” His voice was teasing, his eyes alight with shared mirth.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Rey said. “Some of us were raised by sand. Where'd you learn to swim?”  
  
Finn tossed his head, preening, water beading like a crown in his kinky hair. “Standard Stormtrooper training.” His eyes grew serious again. “Rey, Poe can’t bring the Falcon up here, the engines will knock us off before we can get on. Are you sure you’ll be ok?” He said, glancing at Ben.

Rey nodded, motioning to the paracord. “I’ll be fine, Ben’s got me covered.”

Finn nodded, eyes worried, and began repelling down the cliff-face.

“He cares for you greatly,” Ben said, and there was something in his voice. Rey nodded, saying only:

“He was my first friend,” before adding, “And he and Poe make an adorable couple.”

“Poe Dameron always needed someone to keep him on the ground.” Ben said, voice raised above the crashing waves. Finn was in the water, swimming strongly to the ramp. Chewy grabbed him under the arms and hoisted him like a toddler onto the deck.

“Your turn,” Rey said, and Ben nodded, hooking his winch in and beginning the long descent.

When he reached the bottom, he treaded water and kept a hand on the end of the cord, gesturing for her to come down. She did, and when she glanced down at him the rain streamed around her like stars in hyperspace, framing his pale, upturned face and steady, dark eyes. When her feet touched the water, her stomach clenched, but then Ben’s hand was around her calf, guiding her down. She tried to tread water like he did, like she had in so many dreams, and dipped right under, the trick of it eluding her, so he hauled her up against him, saying:  
  
“Stop wiggling,” and she stilled in his arms, letting his strong stroke carry them towards the Falcon.

They were nearly there when a wave overtopped them, undertow rolling her away from Ben like a feather in a dust devil as she struggled, arms flailing, trying to find her center, get to the Force, get to anything that would get her back to the air. Then her shoulders hit something hard, forcing the air from her lungs.

She was on the sea floor, pressed flat to the packed sand she'd walked on an hour before, maybe 4 meters below the surface. She could see the lights of the Falcon, wavering with each wave. 

And there, coming for her like an oncoming storm, was Ben Solo. 

For a flash, she remembered how she’d looked through his eyes: determined, protective. She wondered if she had the same fire as she saw in his eyes now, the same power as he reached for her.

She grabbed his hand as he pulled her arm over his shoulders and began kicking towards the surface. 

Her lungs burned and something was telling her to open her mouth, to try to breathe — but instead, she tucked her face against his shoulder and forced herself to hold on.

When they broke the surface, she was gasping for breath, his arm around her waist, then she felt Chewie grab ahold of her, lifting her like it was nothing onto the soaked deck, patting her face to make sure she was alright, before leaning down and lifting Ben out by the waist, holding onto him for a long moment. She heard Chewie say something about  _thanks_  and  _you’re safe_ and something about  _welcome home, kid._


End file.
